An enclosure, in the Irish archaeological sense, typically refers to a defined area bounded by a bank, ditch, wall, or some combination of these, and such features appear across the Irish landscape in contexts ranging from early medieval ringforts and ecclesiastical settlements to prehistoric ceremonial sites. Which of these categories the Rathduff example belongs to remains, at least in any accessible published form, an open question.

The townland name Rathduff is itself suggestive. "Rath" derives from the Old Irish for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries, and "dubh", meaning black or dark, appears frequently in Irish place names as a descriptor of landscape, water, or soil. Whether the enclosure at Rathduff is the feature that gave the townland its name, or simply another layer in a longer sequence of occupation, is the kind of question that tends to accumulate around underdocumented sites. Kilkenny as a county has a dense archaeological landscape, with evidence of activity stretching from the Neolithic through the medieval period, and a recorded enclosure in any of its townlands is rarely an isolated curiosity.