Enclosures of this kind are among the most common, and yet most quietly mysterious, features in the Irish landscape. The term covers a broad range of structures, from the circular banks and ditches of a ringfort, which would have enclosed a farming settlement in the early medieval period, to the more irregular boundaries of a cashel built from dry stone, or the earthen perimeter of a cattle pound. Without further detail, the enclosure at Knockeennahone sits somewhere in that spectrum, a shape pressed into the ground that implies habitation, enclosure of livestock, or ritual use, but does not yet say which.

The townland name itself offers a small clue to the texture of the place. Knockeennahone derives from the Irish, most likely containing the element cnoicín, meaning a small hill or hillock, which is a topographical pattern common across Kerry, where ringforts and enclosures were frequently sited on slight rises in the land to improve drainage and visibility. Kerry as a whole has an exceptionally dense concentration of such monuments, a reflection of its heavily settled early medieval landscape. Many of these sites survive as earthworks barely distinguishable from natural undulation, recognisable mainly to those who know what they are looking for.