The four criteria for determining class importance apply to causewayed enclosures as follows:
- Period (currency): Long-lived. The tradition of building causewayed enclosures seems to have lasted for 500 years or more during the first half of the third millennium BC. At some sites, the succession of ditch recutting suggests that they may have been used for three or four centuries or more. Although some causewayed enclosures continued to be the focus of attention in late Neolithic and early Bronze Age times there is no evidence that they were maintained as enclosures, or that new sites were founded after about 2500 BC.
- Rarity: Rare. Approximately 70 certain and possible causewayed enclosures are currently known in England. There is some regional variation in the distribution of causewayed enclosures, notably the low frequency of recorded examples in western and northern areas.
- Diversity (types): Very high. At least seven main types of causewayed enclosure can be recognized on the basis of ground-plan. No firm chronological patterning to the construction of different types can be detected, but there is some regional variation in the preferred arrangement of the ditches.
- Period (representativity): Very High. Causewayed enclosures are among the relatively few classes of middle Neolithic monuments known in England. They are especially important in terms of the range and variety of evidence they preserve for the period, and most of the large collections of artefacts of the period were recovered from excavations at causewayed enclosures. Present evidence suggests that, as a class, causewayed enclosures yield evidence for both domestic and ceremonial activities. Moreover, in cases where ditch recutting was common there is the possibility of a series of stratigraphically successive collections of artefactual and ecofactual evidence.
Assigning scores to these criteria following the system set out in the Monument Evaluation Manual, causewayed enclosures yield a Class Importance Value of 57. This lies towards the upper end of the range of possible values (max.= 64) and emphasizes the importance of this class of monument. In selecting examples of national importance, attention needs to be given to the inclusion of a good mix of types and examples from a range of different situations.