That silence is itself telling. Enclosures of this kind, which can range from prehistoric ringforts enclosed by earthen banks and ditches to early medieval settlement boundaries, are found throughout Ireland in considerable numbers, yet each one carries its own particular character depending on the landscape it occupies and the uses to which it was put across the centuries.

Hazelwood Demesne has its own layered history. The estate was developed in the eighteenth century and is associated with a house designed by Richard Castle, one of the most prolific architects working in Ireland during the 1700s, responsible for a number of the country's great Georgian country houses. The demesne grounds, with their mature woodland running down toward Lough Gill, would have been shaped and managed over generations, meaning that any earlier archaeological features within them have survived alongside, and sometimes despite, later landscaping activity. An enclosure predating the demesne's formal layout would represent a much older claim on this ground, possibly stretching back to the early medieval period or further, when the shores of Lough Gill were as strategically and spiritually significant as they were agriculturally productive.