The rath at Tullabrack in County Clare is one such site, a circular earthwork enclosure of the kind that served as a farmstead and place of security for an Irish family during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. A rath, to give the term its simplest explanation, is a ringfort defined by earthen banks rather than stone walls, the latter being more typical in the west where field clearance made stone abundant. That Tullabrack sits in Clare, a county where both varieties appear, makes the distinction worth noting.

The townland name Tullabrack derives from the Irish, most likely meaning something along the lines of a speckled or brindled hill, which gives a faint sense of the landscape these early farmers would have known. Ringforts of this type were not military fortifications in any grand sense. They were domestic enclosures, the raised banks offering protection for a household, its livestock, and its stores against opportunistic raiding rather than organised warfare. Inside, timber or wattle structures would have housed a family of some local standing, since the labour involved in constructing even a modest rath implied a degree of wealth and social organisation. Hundreds of such sites survive in Clare alone, many still visible as low earthen rings in pasture fields, their outlines most readable from above or in low winter light when shadows pick out the contours.