Enclosures of this kind are among the most common, and most quietly mysterious, features of the Irish countryside. The term covers a broad range of structures, from early medieval ringforts, which were farmsteads enclosed by an earthen bank and ditch, to later field boundaries and ceremonial or defensive works, the precise function of which is often impossible to determine without excavation. What they share is a tendency to persist, sometimes as low grassy banks barely visible above the surrounding ground, sometimes as more substantial earthworks that interrupt a field in a way that puzzles anyone walking through it for the first time.

Kilquane itself is a small townland, and like many in Kerry it carries layers of occupation reaching back well beyond any written record. Kerry's landscape is unusually dense with archaeological features, partly because the relative poverty of its upland soils meant that land was never intensively ploughed in the way that erased so much elsewhere. An enclosure in such a setting might represent the remains of an early farming settlement, a place where livestock were secured overnight, or something older and less easily categorised. Without further detail, the Kilquane enclosure remains one of those features that the map acknowledges and the land quietly holds, waiting for closer attention.