That near-total absence of recorded information is itself a kind of fact worth sitting with. Ireland's countryside is scattered with enclosures of many kinds, from the circular earthen raths and ringforts associated with early medieval farming settlements to earlier prehistoric enclosures whose functions remain debated, and without further detail it is impossible to say which tradition this one belongs to.

The townland name Gortglass derives from the Irish gort glas, meaning green or blue-green field, a common enough placename element in Munster that tends to describe fertile or well-watered ground. Kerry as a county has an exceptionally dense concentration of early medieval and prehistoric field monuments, many of them only partially investigated or documented, and enclosures of various periods often survive as low earthworks or as cropmark traces visible only under particular conditions. This particular site carries a monument record but, for the moment, little more than that.