These enclosures, known in Irish as raths, were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century. A bank of earth, sometimes reinforced with a ditch, defined a household's boundary, sheltered livestock, and marked the social standing of the family within. Tens of thousands of them once existed across Ireland; several thousand survive in some form today, most of them unremarked by any passing traffic.

The Ballyonan example is one of Clare's many such sites, a county whose underlying limestone karst and long agricultural history have preserved an unusually dense record of early settlement. Clare's ringforts range from modest, heavily eroded banks barely visible in a field to well-defined monuments with clear ditches and intact causeways. Without more detailed site-specific information currently available, the particulars of this rath, its dimensions, its condition, whether it retains any internal features, remain to be established from a closer look at the ground itself.