The name Gortnaskohoge derives from the Irish, most likely containing the element "gort", meaning a field or tilled land, which gives a faint suggestion of long agricultural use in this corner of the west. The enclosure itself is the kind of feature that appears across Ireland with quiet regularity, a roughly circular or oval boundary, typically formed from an earthen bank or stone wall, that once defined a domestic or farming space in the early medieval period or earlier. These enclosures are sometimes associated with ringforts, the most common archaeological monument type in Ireland, where a family or small community would have lived, kept livestock, and worked the surrounding land.

Beyond the fact of its existence and its location in Mayo, the specific history of this particular enclosure remains largely undocumented in publicly available sources at present. That in itself says something about the sheer density of archaeological sites across the Irish countryside. Mayo alone contains thousands of recorded monuments, many of them sitting quietly in fields and on hillsides, noted on maps, given a classification, but not yet examined closely enough to yield dates, phases of use, or the names of the people who built and inhabited them. Gortnaskohoge is one of those places, known to exist, waiting for the kind of attention that would turn a map reference into a story.