These enclosures, known in Irish as raths, were the typical farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, built roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. A bank and ditch thrown up around a family's dwelling served less as a serious military fortification and more as a marker of territory and status, a way of keeping livestock in and wolves or opportunistic neighbours out. Ireland is thought to contain somewhere in the region of forty to fifty thousand surviving examples, which makes them among the most common ancient monuments in the country, yet each one occupies its own particular piece of ground with its own unrecorded history.

The name Doonmore itself carries some of that history on the surface. It derives from the Irish Dún Mór, meaning large fort, which suggests the site, or something near it, was substantial enough to register in local memory and eventually fix itself to the place name. Dún, strictly speaking, tends to refer to a more imposing or stone-built enclosure than the earthen rath, though the terms were used with some overlap, and what survives today may reflect only a portion of what once stood. Beyond the place name, the specific history of this particular ringfort remains largely unrecorded in publicly available sources.