The one at Shanakeal, in County Kerry, is among them: a rath, as this type is known in Irish, typically consisting of a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They served primarily as farmsteads, the raised banks offering a degree of protection for a family, their livestock, and their stores.

Kerry is unusually rich in such monuments, its landscape preserving features that elsewhere have been lost to centuries of intensive agriculture. The townland of Shanakeal sits within this broader pattern, its ringfort a quiet remnant of an agricultural way of life that shaped the Irish countryside long before the arrival of Norman castles or plantation estates. The earthworks of a rath were not purely defensive in the military sense; they also carried social weight, marking out a family's landholding and status within the tightly organised structure of early medieval Gaelic society, where rank was carefully observed and a man's enclosure reflected his standing among his neighbours.