A rath, or ringfort, is among the most common monument types in Ireland, a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and used during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, as a farmstead and settlement for a single family or small community. There are thought to be around 40,000 surviving examples across the island, yet each one represents a particular household, a particular patch of cleared land, a particular set of decisions made by people whose names are almost entirely lost to us. That ordinariness is itself a kind of strangeness.

Clare is well supplied with ringforts, its limestone-rich landscape having supported dense early medieval farming communities who left their circular marks across every type of terrain, from low-lying pasture to the exposed karst of the Burren. Gowerhass is a small rural townland, and its rath is the sort of monument that rarely draws attention to itself, lacking the dramatic elevation or the tourist infrastructure of more frequently visited sites. What it does share with its counterparts across the county is age, and the quiet persistence of earthworks that have survived centuries of agricultural change simply because local tradition, and sometimes genuine superstition surrounding fairy forts as these enclosures are known in folklore, kept the plough away from them.