These enclosures, known in Irish as raths, were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They were domestic rather than military in purpose, home to a family and their livestock, and Kerry has more of them than almost any other county in Ireland.

The Dromultan ringfort belongs to this vast and largely unsung category of monument. Several thousand ringforts survive across Ireland, most of them dating from roughly the sixth to the tenth centuries, and the majority occupy agricultural land that has been continuously farmed ever since. The earthworks endure partly because local tradition long held that disturbing a rath was bad luck, a belief rooted in their association with the sí, the supernatural beings of Irish folklore thought to inhabit such places. Whether that superstition or simple practical inconvenience accounts for the survival of this particular example is not recorded.

Beyond its location in Dromultan townland, the specific details of this site remain largely undocumented in publicly available form. What can be said is that Kerry's concentration of ringforts reflects both the density of early medieval settlement in Munster and the relative persistence of pastoral land use across the peninsula, which left many earthworks undisturbed by the deep ploughing that erased comparable sites elsewhere in the country.