An enclosure, in the broad sense used by Irish field archaeology, typically refers to a defined area bounded by an earthen bank, a ditch, a wall, or some combination of these, and can date from anywhere between the Bronze Age and the medieval period. They turn up across the Irish landscape in considerable numbers, many of them ploughed flat or overgrown to near-invisibility, which is precisely what makes the ones that survive worth pausing over.

Shrule itself has a layered past. The village takes its name from the Irish Sruthair, meaning a stream, and sits along the Black River where it connects Lough Mask to Lough Corrib. The area has been inhabited and contested for a very long time; a castle here changed hands repeatedly during the turbulent centuries of Norman and Gaelic rivalry in Connacht, and the village was the site of a massacre during the 1641 rebellion. An enclosure in this landscape could belong to almost any chapter of that long occupation, from a prehistoric farming community to a medieval ecclesiastical or defensive boundary. Without more detailed investigation, its precise character and date remain open questions.