That single word, enclosure, covers a great deal of ground in Irish archaeology. It might describe a ringfort, the remains of a roughly circular earthen bank that once defined a farmstead during the early medieval period. It might be a cashel, the same basic idea executed in stone. It could be something older, or something more ambiguous, a boundary whose original purpose has blurred over the centuries into the landscape itself. The fact that this particular example carries so plain a label is itself a kind of information.

Iragh is a small townland, one of thousands across Clare, each one a unit of land whose name often preserves older Irish words long after the features they described have been absorbed into fields and pasture. Clare as a county is dense with earthworks of this kind. The Burren to the north is the most celebrated concentration, but enclosures of various dates and functions appear throughout the county, many of them unmarked on any tourist map and known largely to farmers and fieldwalkers. Without further detail on this specific site, what can be said is that its very existence in the archaeological record means someone, at some point, identified it as worth noting: a shape in the ground, a line of stones, a slight rise that did not belong to the natural contour of the land.