These circular enclosures, known in Irish as raths, were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches thrown up to protect a household, its animals, and its stores. Tens of thousands of them survive across the island, yet each one represents a particular family's decision, at a particular moment, to settle and enclose a patch of ground.

Cloghaun Beg itself is a small townland, and beyond the fact that a rath has been recorded here, the specific details of this particular enclosure remain largely undocumented in publicly available sources. Clare is a county with a dense concentration of ringforts, many of them sitting in the limestone terrain of the Burren or scattered across its more fertile lowlands, and without further detail it is difficult to say much about the character of this one: its diameter, its state of preservation, how many banks it retains, or whether any internal features survive.