The example at Cloonmore in County Clare is one of these quiet presences, a rath, which is the Irish term for a roughly circular earthwork enclosure, typically defined by one or more banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. These were not military fortifications in the conventional sense but farmsteads, the defended homesteads of farming families who lived within the raised earthen ring and kept their livestock secured against both animals and rivals.

Clare is a county with a notably dense concentration of such sites, its landscape having preserved many features that elsewhere were ploughed away or built over in more recent centuries. The Burren alone accounts for an extraordinary number, but ringforts appear throughout the county, including in the more pastoral townlands further east and south. The townland of Cloonmore, whose name derives from the Irish Cluain Mór, meaning the great meadow or pasture, suggests a landscape long given over to agricultural use, exactly the kind of setting where a prosperous early medieval family might have chosen to establish a defended enclosure. Beyond that etymological thread, the documentary record for this particular site remains limited in what is currently accessible.