The example at Cloonmore in County Clare is one of countless such monuments that survive, often unannounced, in fields and along hedgerows throughout the county. A rath, as this type is commonly known, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, constructed during the early medieval period, broadly from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and used primarily as a farmstead and place of shelter for a family and their livestock.

Clare is particularly well furnished with these structures, owing in part to the relative stability of its pastoral landscape over the intervening centuries, which allowed earthworks to survive where tillage or development elsewhere might have levelled them. The townland name Cloonmore derives from the Irish "Cluain Mór", meaning the large meadow or pasture, which itself hints at the kind of agricultural setting in which such a fort would originally have functioned. The people who built and occupied raths were not warriors or chieftains in any grand sense but ordinary farming families, and the enclosing bank served as much to keep animals in as to keep threats out. Over time, many of these sites acquired a secondary life in local folklore as "fairy forts", places associated with the otherworld and best left undisturbed, a belief that paradoxically helped preserve them long after their original purpose was forgotten.