Enclosures of this kind are among the most common yet most ambiguous features in the Irish countryside. They may be the remains of a ringfort, a roughly circular earthwork that once served as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, or they may belong to an entirely different tradition, prehistoric, ecclesiastical, or agricultural. Without further detail, the category of "enclosure" functions almost as a placeholder, acknowledging that something deliberate was built here, that it survives in some form, and that its full story has not yet been told.