These roughly circular enclosures, known in Irish as raths, were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a bank and ditch surrounding a farmstead. Tens of thousands once existed across the island; several thousand survive in some form today, and each one represents a family or small community that chose a particular patch of ground and decided to mark it as theirs.

Moyasta itself is a small townland on the Kilmihil peninsula, edging towards Poulnasherry Bay. The area around the Shannon Estuary was well settled during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, when the rath was the standard unit of agricultural life. A family of middling status would have enclosed their house, animals, and stores within a single earthen bank; wealthier or more powerful households sometimes built two or three concentric rings, a form known as a multivallate rath. Without more specific detail for this particular site, it is not possible to say which type survives at Moyasta, how well preserved the earthwork is, or whether any associated features such as a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage sometimes used for storage or refuge, have been recorded in connection with it.

What can be said is that the townland sits in a part of Clare where the land flattens and opens towards tidal inlets, and where ringforts of this kind have long been woven into the field pattern, sometimes surviving as raised platforms in pasture, sometimes reduced to a slight ridge detectable mainly in low winter light or from the air.