These structures, known in Irish as ráth when formed from raised earthen banks and ditches, were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century. They housed families, enclosed livestock, and marked out a claim on the land. Thousands survive across the country, yet each one carries its own particular relationship with the ground it occupies, the fields that have grown up around it, and the community that once animated it.

Kilbannivane is a small townland in Kerry, and like many such places its name preserves older layers of meaning in Irish. The ringfort there belongs to a category of monument that was once so common in Ireland that early cartographers and farmers took them almost for granted, though attitudes have shifted considerably as their archaeological significance has become better understood. A ráth of this kind would typically consist of one or more circular banks, possibly accompanied by an outer fosse or ditch, enclosing a central area where a house or houses once stood. Some examples also contain souterrains, underground stone-lined passages that may have served for storage or refuge. Whether any such features survive at Kilbannivane is not currently documented in accessible records.

The site sits within a county extraordinarily dense with early medieval remains, Kerry having preserved a remarkable concentration of ringforts, promontory forts, ogham stones, and early ecclesiastical sites. That density reflects both the area's settlement patterns in the early medieval period and, in part, the relative absence of the intensive arable agriculture that destroyed so many comparable monuments elsewhere in Ireland.