These enclosures, known in Irish as raths, were the standard farmstead of early medieval Ireland, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. A family of some local standing would have raised a bank of earth, sometimes reinforced with a timber palisade or a stone wall, enclosing a space where they kept livestock at night, stored goods, and likely housed the main dwelling. Tens of thousands of them survive across the country in various states of preservation, and the one at Ballinard is among that vast, largely anonymous company.

The documentary record for this particular site is thin. What can be said with confidence is that the rath form is one of the most enduring physical signatures of early Irish rural life, and Kerry, with its complicated topography of mountain, bog, and coastal plain, preserves a remarkable density of them. Many were built on slightly elevated ground to improve drainage and visibility, and some were later absorbed into local folklore as the dwelling places of the sí, the supernatural inhabitants of the otherworld, which afforded them a degree of accidental protection from disturbance across the centuries. Whether the Ballinard example carries any such local tradition is not recorded.