The example at Clooneyogan, in County Clare, belongs to a category of site known as a rath, a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and internal ditch, typically dating to the early medieval period between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. These were the farmsteads of their age, places where a family and their livestock sheltered behind raised earthworks, and they survive in such numbers partly because later generations regarded them with enough unease, associating them with the fairy world, to leave them largely undisturbed.

Clare is particularly well furnished with such monuments, sitting as it does within a broader landscape that has seen continuous human habitation since prehistoric times. The townland name Clooneyogan derives from the Irish, with "cluain" pointing to a meadow or pastoral ground, which is broadly consistent with the kind of low-lying, grazeable terrain where early medieval farming communities tended to establish themselves. Without more detailed field records it is difficult to say more about this particular enclosure's dimensions, condition, or any associated features such as a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage sometimes found within ringforts and used for storage or refuge. What can be said is that its presence in the landscape marks a point of settlement going back well over a thousand years, embedded in ground that has probably been farmed in some form ever since.