The name of the townland itself is an anglicisation of an Irish original, and in that compressed, half-legible form it carries the texture of the landscape it belongs to, somewhere on the western edge of Ireland where small fields, bog margins, and the remnants of earlier habitation exist in close proximity.

An enclosure, in the archaeological sense, is a broad category. It can refer to anything from a ringfort, the circular earthen or stone enclosure used as a farmstead in early medieval Ireland, to a burial enclosure, a garden feature, or a livestock pound of uncertain date. Without further detail it is impossible to say what function this particular example served, or when it was built. What can be said is that Mayo contains a remarkable density of such features, many of them unexcavated and known only from field survey or aerial photography, their interiors unread, their histories intact by default rather than by design. Lisheenielagaun joins a long list of places that have been noticed, named, and recorded, but not yet fully described.