It carries a classification, a map reference, and a place in the official record of Irish monuments, yet the substance of what it actually is, its age, its form, its purpose, sits just out of reach.

An enclosure, in the archaeological sense, is a broad category. It can describe anything from a prehistoric ringfort, a roughly circular bank-and-ditch farmstead that was the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, to a later field boundary of no great antiquity. The name Leamaneigh is more familiar from nearby Leamaneh Castle, the tower house and later semi-fortified house associated with the O'Brien family and, in particular, with Máire Rua O'Brien, the seventeenth-century noblewoman whose life attracted considerable legend. That this townland shares a root with the castle suggests a landscape that has been continuously significant, even if the precise character of this enclosure within it remains unrecorded in any publicly available form.

The site sits in a part of Clare where the ground itself tends to complicate fieldwork. The Burren's fractured limestone pavement, its clints and grikes, its thin soils and shifting seasonal wetness, can obscure or preserve features in equal measure, and monuments in this region sometimes resist easy interpretation even when they are standing plainly in view.