These enclosures, known in Irish as ráth, were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised circular area surrounded by one or more banks and ditches. They were not primarily military structures, despite the word "fort"; they were homes, places where a farming family kept livestock and lived within a defended boundary. Ireland has tens of thousands of them, yet each one occupies a specific patch of ground chosen by a specific household, and that particularity is easy to overlook.

Cloonconragh itself is a small rural townland, and beyond its location in Mayo the documentary record for this site is, for the moment, thin. What can be said is that ringforts of this type were in use roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and their distribution across the Irish midlands and west reflects a settled, agricultural society organised around kinship and cattle. The earthen bank of a rath was built by people who intended to stay, and the fact that so many of these structures survive at all, even as grassed-over humps in fields, is a consequence of the deep respect, and perhaps the residual unease, that later generations felt towards them. In folklore, ringforts were understood to be the dwellings of the sídhe, the supernatural inhabitants of the otherworld, and farmers historically avoided disturbing them even when land was scarce.