A rath, as this type of enclosure is commonly called, is a roughly circular earthwork, typically consisting of one or more raised banks and ditches, constructed during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands of them survive across Ireland, yet each one marks a particular household, a particular patch of ground that someone once considered worth defending and defining.

Ringforts were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, home to a family and their livestock, and the scale of the enclosure often reflected the status of the occupant. A single bank might indicate a modest farmer; multiple concentric banks suggested someone of greater social standing. The name Cloonbanaun derives from the Irish, likely containing the element meaning a marshy meadow or plain, which hints at the kind of low-lying, workable ground that early farmers would have sought out. Mayo, a county shaped by glacial drift and bogland, contains a significant number of these monuments, many of them poorly documented or only partially surveyed, their earthworks softened by centuries of agriculture and weather.