Enclosures of this kind are among the most common, and most quietly mysterious, features of the Irish rural landscape. The term covers a broad range of structures, from the circular earthen ringforts that served as defended farmsteads in the early medieval period to prehistoric ceremonial boundaries, their original purposes now readable only in their shape and setting.

Kilmore itself is a townland name derived from the Irish Cill Mhór, meaning the large church, suggesting a parish with early ecclesiastical associations, though what relationship, if any, the enclosure bears to that history remains unclear. Clare's landscape is dense with such features, many of them unexcavated and known only from fieldwork or aerial survey, their interiors unread, their dates unconfirmed. An enclosure without further detail is, in one sense, an open question pressed into the earth.