The one at Listellick, in County Kerry, is a rath, the term used for a ringfort constructed primarily from earthworks rather than stone. A rath typically consists of a circular raised bank, sometimes doubled or tripled, enclosing a central area that would once have sheltered a farmstead and its inhabitants during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries.

Ringforts of this kind were not military fortifications in any serious sense. They were the homes of farming families, the banks serving as much to define territory and contain livestock as to provide genuine defence. Kerry has an unusually dense concentration of them, a reflection of the county's long-settled agricultural landscape. The name Listellick itself is anglicised from the Irish, and townland names in this part of Munster frequently preserve older Gaelic references to the very features, forts, hills, and water sources, that still sit within their boundaries. Beyond its classification as a rath and its location in this north Kerry townland, the specific history of this particular enclosure remains thinly documented in publicly available sources.