These circular enclosures, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, were the farmsteads of their age, housing a family and its livestock within a defended perimeter. Ireland contains thousands of them, and yet each one occupies its own particular ground, shaped by whoever chose that spot, on that slope, facing that view, sometime between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries.

The rath at Doolaig belongs to a county extraordinarily dense with such remains. Kerry's relative isolation from later intensive agricultural development has meant that earthworks which elsewhere were levelled and ploughed away have, in many cases, survived. A rath like this would originally have sheltered a farming household of middling or modest status, the internal platform providing space for a timber or wattle dwelling, perhaps a souterrain beneath, which is an underground stone-lined passage used for storage or refuge, and an enclosing bank that signalled both security and social standing to any passing traveller.

Because the available record for this particular site is sparse, the finer details of Doolaig's rath, its exact dimensions, condition, or any finds associated with it, remain obscure for now. What can be said is that its presence in the townland connects that small patch of ground to a way of life that persisted for centuries across the Irish countryside, and that the earthwork itself, however overgrown or unassuming it may appear, is older than almost anything else in the landscape around it.