The mountain is already well known for its deserted village, a long street of roofless stone cottages abandoned during and after the Famine years of the 1840s, but the landscape around it holds further structures that have yet to receive the same attention. This enclosure is one of them.

Slievemore has been a place of human activity for millennia. The mountain and its surrounds contain evidence of prehistoric settlement, field systems, and funerary monuments, suggesting that the communities who once worked this ground shaped it carefully over long periods. An enclosure of this kind would typically consist of a defined area bounded by a stone wall or earthen bank, used variously across Irish prehistory and the early medieval period for settlement, agriculture, or the management of livestock. Whether this particular example belongs to one of those broad traditions, or to a more recent phase of land use, is a question the available record does not yet answer. Slievemore's archaeology has a habit of quietly exceeding expectations, and what looks like a simple boundary feature on a hillside sometimes turns out to carry considerably more history within its walls.