A rath, to use the Irish term, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They served primarily as farmsteads, the defended homesteads of farming families, and Ireland contains tens of thousands of them, making them among the most common archaeological monuments on the island. That commonness does not make any individual example unremarkable; each one is a fixed point in an agricultural landscape that has been continuously worked and reshaped for over a millennium.

Inchincummer is a small townland in County Kerry, and the rath it contains belongs to a broader pattern of early medieval settlement that once covered this part of Munster in some density. The choice of location for a rath was rarely accidental. Builders typically favoured slight elevations with good drainage and clear sightlines across the surrounding land, and the earthen bank, sometimes topped with a timber palisade, offered a degree of protection for livestock as much as for people. Over centuries, many of these enclosures have been worn down by ploughing, vegetation, and the slow weight of time, which is why those that survive as legible earthworks carry particular value as markers of a way of life that otherwise left few traces above ground.