These circular enclosures, known in Irish as raths, were the standard farmstead of early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of an earthen bank and ditch enclosing a family's living quarters and perhaps a small number of outbuildings. Tens of thousands of them survive across the country in varying states of preservation, yet each one represents a particular patch of ground that someone, at some point between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, decided was worth defending and calling home.

Feeard itself is a small townland in Clare, a county whose landscape contains a remarkable concentration of early medieval remains, shaped in part by the rocky terrain of the Burren to the north and the more agricultural lowlands to the south and east. The rath at Feeard belongs to this broader pattern of settlement, though the specific details of its construction, its diameter, the height of its banks, and any features that might distinguish it from its neighbours, remain to be fully recorded in the public domain. What can be said is that its survival into the present is itself noteworthy. Many ringforts were levelled during agricultural improvement schemes, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, making those that remain markers not just of early medieval life but of a longer history of land use and, sometimes, of local reluctance to disturb ground that tradition held to be fairy-inhabited.