Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when constructed from earthen banks and ditches, were the predominant settlement form of early medieval Ireland, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Most were farmsteads, home to a single family and their livestock, surrounded by one or more raised banks that provided a degree of protection and status. Ireland has somewhere in the region of forty to fifty thousand of them, yet each occupies its own particular patch of ground, shaped by whoever raised the banks and whatever life was lived inside them.

Creevagh More itself is a townland name with roots in the Irish, likely derived from words relating to a branchy or tree-covered place, which gives some sense of how this corner of Clare may once have appeared. Beyond its classification as a rath, the specific history of this particular enclosure, its dimensions, the number of its banks, any finds associated with it, and its condition today, remains to be fully documented in accessible public records. What can be said is that its survival into the present is itself a kind of quiet achievement. Many ringforts across Ireland were levelled during land clearances, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though folklore attaching them to the fairies offered some protection in certain areas, with farmers reluctant to disturb what were sometimes called fairy forts.