Ringforts are circular enclosures, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, that served as farmsteads and homesteads during the Early Medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Ireland has somewhere in the region of forty thousand of them, which makes them among the most common archaeological monuments in the country, yet each one carries its own particular relationship to the landscape it was built into, and the one at Camp is no exception.

The Dingle Peninsula has long been one of the more archaeologically dense parts of Ireland, a place where promontory forts, ogham stones, beehive huts, and early Christian sites are distributed across the same ground that later generations farmed and grazed without much ceremony. A rath in this setting would have functioned as the enclosed residence of a farming family of some local standing, the earthen bank providing a degree of security for livestock as much as for people. The village of Camp itself sits at the foot of the Slieve Mish mountains, where the peninsula begins to narrow toward Tralee Bay, and the broader territory has been continuously inhabited since prehistoric times.