These enclosures, known in Irish as ráth when constructed from earthen banks and ditches, were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. A single family and their livestock would have lived within the raised ring, the bank offering a degree of security and a clear marker of settled ownership over the land.

Clare is particularly dense with such sites. The county's geology and land use patterns have meant that many ringforts survived the centuries of agricultural change that erased comparable monuments elsewhere in Ireland. Cloonarass itself is a small rural townland, and like hundreds of similar places across the county, it holds this kind of monument almost incidentally, an archaeological feature folded into farmland with no great fanfare. The rath classification suggests an earthen rather than a stone construction, distinguishing it from the cashels and cahers more commonly associated with the Burren to the north, where limestone made stone enclosures the practical choice.

The available record for this particular site is currently thin, and very little specific detail about its condition, dimensions, or local history has been documented in accessible sources. What can be said with confidence is that it belongs to a class of monument that represents one of the most numerous and socially significant survivals from early medieval Ireland, ordinary in type but individually irreplaceable as a fixed point in a landscape that has been continuously farmed and altered for centuries.