It belongs to a category of monument that turns up across Ireland in many forms: raised banks, sunken ditches, enclosures, or field boundaries that can date anywhere from the Bronze Age to the early medieval period, and sometimes later. Without further detail, the earthwork at Carrowcore remains a shape on the ground, noted but unexplained.

The name Carrowcore derives from the Irish, most likely a variation of "ceathrú" meaning a quarter, a unit of land division common in the Gaelic system of territorial organisation. Clare itself is dense with earthworks of many kinds, from ring forts, which are circular enclosures that once served as farmsteads, to more irregular linear earthworks associated with territorial boundaries or drainage. Which of these categories the Carrowcore monument falls into, and what period it belongs to, is not currently possible to say from what is publicly available.