A rath is essentially a ringfort, a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built and occupied primarily during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. These were the farmsteads of their age, home to families of varying status, and the landscape of Kilkenny is dotted with them, though many have been reduced by centuries of ploughing and land clearance to little more than a faint rise in a field.

Dunkitt itself is a small rural townland in the parish of Kilmacow, positioned in that liminal zone where County Kilkenny meets the tidal reaches of the Suir. The area was well settled in the early medieval period, as the density of ringfort sites across south Leinster and the adjacent parts of Munster suggests, and proximity to navigable water would have made a location here strategically and economically useful for a farming household. Beyond the broad contours of that context, the specific history of this particular enclosure, its dimensions, the number of its banks, whether any internal features survive, remains unrecorded in publicly available form at present, which places it in an unusual category: a monument that is known to exist, is considered significant enough to be classified and protected, but whose details remain largely unexamined in the open record.