Enclosures of this kind are among the most common yet most varied monuments in the Irish countryside. The term covers everything from early medieval ringforts, which were the farmsteads of farming families between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, to later ecclesiastical enclosures that once defined the boundaries of early church sites. Without more detailed fieldwork notes, the specific form and date of this one remain open questions, which is, in its own way, part of what makes it worth knowing about.

Smithstown is a small townland, and the enclosure is one of countless such features that pepper Clare's agricultural landscape, many of them visible only as subtle earthwork rises or as cropmarks from above. Clare has a particularly dense concentration of early medieval settlement remains, shaped by the same pastoral farming traditions that defined much of Munster in the early Christian period. Whether this enclosure represents a defended homestead, a cattle pound, or something with a ritual or ecclesiastical function is the kind of question that fieldwork and excavation alone can answer.