Enclosures of this kind are among the most common yet least understood features of the Irish countryside. The term covers a broad range of structures, from the circular earthen banks of a ringfort, which would have enclosed a farmstead during the early medieval period, to later field boundaries and enclosures whose purposes were entirely different. Without more detailed documentation, Carrowbeg's example sits in a kind of archival limbo, mapped and classified but not yet fully described.