The example at Harristown in County Kilkenny belongs to the class known as a rath, a term referring to a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. These were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and they served as both a domestic settlement and a means of enclosing livestock against theft or predation. That so many survive at all, even in degraded form, owes much to a deep-rooted folk belief that disturbing a ringfort, sometimes called a fairy fort, invites misfortune.

The Harristown site sits within a landscape that would have been well populated during the early medieval period. Kilkenny's fertile river valleys and rolling farmland made it attractive to the small family units who built and lived within these enclosures, and ringforts in the county tend to cluster where agricultural conditions were most favourable. The rath form, built from the earth thrown up when the surrounding ditch was dug, was a practical solution requiring no specialist materials, only labour and time. Within the banked enclosure, a family might have maintained a timber house, outbuildings, and a small yard, the whole arrangement representing both a working farm and a statement of territorial occupation in a society organised around kinship and cattle.