Earthworks is a broad category, covering everything from prehistoric burial mounds and ringforts to later field boundaries and defensive enclosures, and the uncertainty around what exactly this one represents is itself part of what makes it worth noting. That ambiguity is not unusual. Demesne landscapes, the enclosed private estates that surrounded the great houses of Anglo-Irish families, frequently absorbed and obscured earlier features, sometimes deliberately incorporated into ornamental grounds, sometimes simply left alone as the land was reorganised around them.

Kilfane itself has a layered past. The area is associated with the de Cantwell family, Anglo-Norman settlers who arrived in Ireland in the wake of the twelfth-century invasion and left their mark in stone. The church at Kilfane contains one of the finest examples of a medieval effigy in Ireland, the so-called Cantwell Fada, a tall carved figure of a mailed knight dating to around the thirteenth or fourteenth century. The demesne later became associated with the Power family, and the grounds contain a romantically designed cottage and waterfall garden from the late eighteenth century, a rare surviving example of that period's taste for contrived natural scenery. Into this already complicated landscape, the earthwork fits as one more layer, its origins and purpose unrecorded in any detail that currently survives in accessible form.