A rath, sometimes called a ringfort, is 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, and used as a defended farmstead for a family and their livestock. Ireland has somewhere in the region of forty thousand of them, which makes the type common enough, yet each one occupies a specific patch of ground that somebody, at some point, chose deliberately, and that choice tends to repay attention.

Ballydavock is a small townland, and the rath there represents the kind of site that accumulates its significance quietly. These enclosures were not military fortifications in any grand sense but rather the ordinary domestic architecture of early medieval rural life, the farmyard equivalent of a walled property, offering protection against cattle raiders and wolves as much as human enemies. The earthen banks, often topped originally with a timber palisade, enclosed a space where roundhouses stood, grain was stored, and the rhythms of agricultural life played out across generations. In many parts of Ireland, raths became associated in later folk tradition with the fairy mounds, or síde, lending them a supernatural reputation that helped preserve them from the plough long after their original function was forgotten.