Highrath, in County Kilkenny, carries within it the Old Irish word rath, referring to a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that was the dominant settlement form in early medieval Ireland, built typically between the sixth and tenth centuries. That a place should be named for such a feature, and that an enclosure should still be recorded there as a distinct monument, suggests some continuity between the landscape and its deeper past.

Enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, yet each one represents a particular decision made by a particular community, a choice about where to live, how to defend a household, and how to mark out territory in a working landscape. They were typically formed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, sometimes with a wooden palisade on top, enclosing a roughly circular area where a family and their animals would have sheltered. The Kilkenny landscape is well supplied with such remains, many of them surviving as low earthworks in pasture fields, visible mainly as crop marks or as slight rises in the ground that a casual walker might not register at all.