These circular earthwork enclosures, built during the early medieval period, were the farmsteads of their day, a raised bank of earth or stone surrounding a family's dwelling and perhaps a few outbuildings, offering a degree of status and security rather than serious military defence. Ireland has somewhere in the region of forty thousand of them recorded, which makes them among the most common archaeological monuments in the country, and yet each one carries its own particular silence, its own slight mystery about who built it and who lived within it.

Boherboy itself is a small rural townland, and like so many similar places across Kerry, it preserves in its name a trace of older Irish: "Bóthar Buí", meaning the yellow road. The rath in this townland is recorded as a monument, but the documentary record for this specific site is thin, and the particulars, its dimensions, its condition, the details of any finds or surveys, remain largely inaccessible for now. What can be said is that Kerry's landscape is densely scattered with such features, many of them surviving as raised circular platforms, sometimes still ringed by a visible earthen bank, sometimes reduced to a slight swelling in a field that only catches the eye in low winter light when shadows do the work that signage cannot.