Turlough takes its name from the Irish word for a seasonal lake, one of those curious low-lying depressions that flood in winter and dry out in summer, draining through the limestone beneath them rather than over any visible outlet. That the settlement here was enclosed, marked off from its surroundings by a boundary of earth or stone, suggests that someone once considered this shifting, waterlogged ground worth defending or at least defining.

Enclosures of this kind are among the most common and least understood monument types in the Irish countryside. They range from the substantial stone-walled raths and ring-forts of the early medieval period to more modest ditched boundaries whose date and purpose remain contested. Without more detailed recorded information surviving about this particular example, it is difficult to say much about who built it, when, or why. What can be said is that Turlough as a place has a long history of human attention: the village is home to a round tower and a medieval church associated with a holy well, and the broader barony of Clanmorris has yielded evidence of settlement reaching back to prehistory. An enclosure in such a landscape fits naturally into a pattern of people making themselves at home in terrain that would test any modern builder.