The one at Cloonmore in County Clare is a rath, the term used for a ringfort constructed primarily from earthworks rather than stone. A rath typically consists of one or more roughly circular earthen banks and ditches enclosing a central living area, and would have served as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. That so many survive at all owes something to a persistent folk belief associating ringforts with the fairy mounds of Irish tradition, making farmers reluctant to disturb them even when agricultural convenience might otherwise have argued for their removal.

Cloonmore itself is a townland in County Clare, a county whose landscape holds an unusually dense concentration of early medieval remains alongside its better-known prehistoric monuments. The rath here fits into that broader pattern of settled farming communities who shaped much of the rural landscape long before the arrival of the Normans. Beyond its classification as a ringfort of the earthwork type and its location in this particular townland, the available record for this site is sparse, and the honest position is that the specific history of this enclosure, who built it, when precisely it was in use, and what, if anything, has been found within it, remains largely undocumented in publicly accessible form.