These circular enclosures, known in Irish as raths, were the dominant settlement form of early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised earthen bank and ditch enclosing a homestead. Thousands survive across the country, yet each one marks a specific family, a specific patch of ground, a specific decision about where to live made somewhere between the fifth and twelfth centuries.

Kilcloher lies in the Kilkee area of west Clare, a landscape of thin soils over limestone where the evidence of early settlement tends to survive well precisely because the land was never intensively ploughed or developed. Raths in this part of the country were often the farmsteads of middling landowners, the rí tuaithe class and their subordinates in the intricate social hierarchy of Gaelic Ireland. The earthwork bank served less as a military fortification and more as a boundary marker, a statement of ownership and status, and a practical enclosure for livestock at night. Over the centuries many such sites became associated in folklore with the sídhe, the supernatural inhabitants of the otherworld, which afforded them a degree of protection against deliberate destruction that purely practical structures rarely enjoyed.