The example at Ballygowan in County Kilkenny is one such enclosure, a rath, which is the Irish term for a ringfort defined by earthen rather than stone defences. These were not military fortifications in any dramatic sense; they were farmsteads, the equivalent of a walled yard, offering livestock protection and a degree of social prestige to whoever held the land within.

Kilkenny as a county is thickly settled with early medieval remains, its landscape shaped by centuries of Gaelic farming before the Anglo-Norman arrival of the twelfth century reorganised landholding and left its own monuments across the same ground. Raths like the one at Ballygowan belong to an older layer of that landscape, typically dated to somewhere between the fifth and twelfth centuries, when the ringfort was the dominant form of rural settlement across Ireland. The placename Ballygowan itself follows a common Irish pattern, derived from baile, meaning townland or settlement, suggesting continuous human presence in this locality across a considerable span of time.