The enclosure itself is modest, possibly nothing more than a pen where animals were folded, but its surroundings tell a quieter story about a landscape that was once worked much more intensively than it appears today.

Those relict cultivation ridges, sometimes called lazy beds, are the remains of a spade-tillage system used widely across the west of Ireland, in which soil was mounded into broad parallel strips to improve drainage and maximise the growing area on poor or waterlogged ground. That both the ridges and the enclosure went unrecorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1838 and the later nineteenth-century revision suggests they had already fallen out of active use or simply escaped the surveyors' attention. The enclosure came to light more recently, noted during fieldwork in the 1980s by researchers connected to the Achill Archaeological Field School, and was eventually listed in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1991 and the Record of Monuments and Places in 1997. Theresa McDonald of the Field School confirmed the identification in 2013, describing it as a small enclosure, likely an animal pen.