The example at Enagh in County Clare is one such site, a circular enclosure of the kind that once served as a farmstead or small settlement during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. These enclosures were typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and occasionally by drystone walls, designed less for military defence than for the practical business of keeping livestock secure and marking out a family's territory in the landscape.

Raths of this type were the basic unit of rural life in early medieval Ireland, home to the farming families who worked the land under the Brehon law system. The townland name Enagh, from the Irish eanaigh meaning a marshy or watery place, suggests the kind of low-lying ground that early settlers often favoured for its accessibility to water and its relatively sheltered character. Clare is particularly well furnished with such monuments, a reflection of the county's long and densely layered history of settlement reaching back well before the arrival of Christianity.