A rath is a roughly circular enclosure, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period as a farmstead or homestead for a family of some local standing. Thousands survive across Ireland, many reduced to faint cropmarks or slight rises in a field, and this one in Craggaunoonia is among those that have not yet had their details formally published.

The name Craggaunoonia itself has the feel of a place shaped by the landscape, the kind of Kerry townland where rocky outcrops and rough grazing have preserved earthworks simply by making agriculture difficult. Ringforts of this type were in use roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, serving as enclosed farmsteads rather than military fortifications, despite what the word "fort" implies. The surrounding bank would have defined a household's space, sheltering a timber or stone dwelling and perhaps a small enclosure for livestock. Many thousands of such sites survive in Kerry alone, the county having one of the denser concentrations in the country, partly because its terrain has limited the kind of deep ploughing that elsewhere erased similar monuments.