The word "rath" refers to a ringfort, the circular earthwork enclosure that served as a farmstead and dwelling for Irish families during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and the presence of one here is old enough that it gave the entire place its identity on the map. Tens of thousands of ringforts survive across Ireland in various states of preservation, yet each one represents an individual household, a patch of land cleared and defended by a family whose name has long since dissolved into the landscape around it.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths when constructed primarily from earthen banks and ditches rather than stone, were the dominant settlement form of early Christian Ireland. A typical example would have consisted of one or more circular ramparts enclosing a central living area, with timber structures inside for sleeping, cooking, and sheltering animals. The name Rathredmond suggests that at some point the site became associated with a person called Redmond, an Hiberno-Norman given name derived from the Germanic Raymond, which became widespread in Ireland following the twelfth-century Norman arrival. This kind of naming pattern, where a pre-Norman earthwork acquired a Norman personal name over subsequent generations, is relatively common across Connacht and points to layers of occupation and memory accumulating around a single mound of earth over centuries.