Enclosures of this kind are among the most common yet most quietly ambiguous monuments in the Irish countryside. The term covers a broad range of structures, from early medieval ringforts, which were enclosed farmsteads typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, to later field boundaries and ecclesiastical enclosures that surrounded early church sites. Without further detail it is difficult to place Lawaus within any of those categories, which is itself a kind of fact worth noting.

Mayo has no shortage of such features. The county's boglands and rough pastures have preserved earthworks that might have been ploughed flat elsewhere, and aerial surveys over recent decades have revealed enclosures that are invisible at ground level, detectable only as cropmarks or peat-stain patterns. The townland name Lawaus, anglicised from an older Irish form, hints at a landscape long settled and long named, though the specific history of this particular monument remains, for now, undocumented in any accessible source.