Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when formed from earthen banks and ditches, are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, with estimates suggesting somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 once existed across the country. They date primarily from the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1000 AD, and functioned as enclosed farmsteads, the raised circular banks offering a degree of protection for a family, their livestock, and their small cluster of buildings. Clare, with its limestone karst terrain and long-settled agricultural land, holds a considerable number of them. The rath at Ballycunneen is one such site, a local node in a pattern of early medieval settlement that, taken together, tells you a great deal about how rural Ireland was organised in the centuries before the Norse and Norman arrivals reshaped the island's political geography. Individual raths varied considerably in scale and elaboration, from modest single-banked enclosures to more complex multivallate structures with two or three concentric rings of earthwork, the latter tending to indicate higher social status within the Gaelic farming hierarchy.