These circular enclosures, known in Irish as raths, were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches thrown up around a central living area. Tens of thousands of them survive across the country in varying states of preservation, yet each one represents a particular family, a particular patch of ground, a particular moment somewhere between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries when someone decided this was where they would build and farm and keep their cattle safe.

The Leeds ringfort in Clare is one of those sites whose local story remains, for now, largely unrecorded in any publicly available form. What can be said is that Clare as a whole is rich in early medieval settlement evidence, and raths in this part of Connacht's borderland often occupy elevated or well-drained ground, chosen by their builders for the same practical reasons that continue to make such spots attractive today. The rath itself would once have enclosed a timber or wattle house, perhaps a souterrain, which is an underground stone-lined passage used for storage or refuge, and the whole would have been the centre of a small agricultural world. Over the centuries, as landholding patterns shifted and the old Gaelic order gave way to plantation and later agricultural modernisation, many such sites were absorbed into field boundaries, built over, or simply left to grass over and sink slowly into the earth.