Enclosures of this type are among the most common yet least understood monuments in the Irish countryside. They typically take the form of a circular or roughly oval bank and ditch, and may date to anywhere between the Bronze Age and the early medieval period. Some served as farmsteads, others as ceremonial or funerary spaces, and the distinction is not always easy to draw from surface evidence alone.

The Derreen enclosure is catalogued in the Archaeological Inventory of County Kerry, a systematic survey of the monuments of south-west Kerry compiled by Muiris O'Sullivan and Liam Sheehan and published in 1996. That inventory remains one of the more thorough regional surveys carried out in Ireland, working townland by townland through a landscape that contains an unusually dense concentration of prehistoric and early historic remains. Kerry's physical geography, with its peninsulas pushing out into the Atlantic and its interior of mountain and bog, meant that many areas were never heavily developed in later centuries, leaving earthworks and field systems relatively undisturbed. The Derreen enclosure sits within that broader context, one entry among hundreds that together sketch out a populated and long-worked terrain.