Enclosures of this kind, roughly circular or oval banks of earth and stone that once defined a settlement or farmstead, appear across Ireland in considerable numbers, yet the smaller of two clustered together at the same location is the sort of detail that tends to slip past even attentive visitors. The pairing itself is the anomaly worth noting; two enclosures in close proximity often suggest successive phases of occupation, or a domestic and agricultural division of space, though the specific relationship between these two examples at Keel remains a matter for careful fieldwork rather than easy assumption.

The site at Keel falls within the townland system of the Iveragh Peninsula, a part of Kerry that saw sustained human activity from prehistory through the early medieval period and beyond. Enclosures across this region range from the imposing to the barely traceable, and south-west Kerry in particular preserves a remarkable density of them, catalogued in O'Sullivan and Sheehan's archaeological inventory of the area published in 1996. That volume, covering the archaeology of south-west Kerry in systematic detail, notes this as the smaller of two enclosures at the location, a designation that implies the larger companion is the more immediately legible feature on the ground. Without further excavation, the date and precise function of either enclosure is difficult to fix with certainty, though comparable sites in the region tend to cluster around the early medieval centuries, when ringforts and enclosed farmsteads were a dominant form of rural organisation across Ireland.