The one at Kilglassy in County Clare is a rath, the most common type, which means it was originally an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. A rath typically consisted of one or more circular earthen banks and ditches enclosing a domestic space, home to a single family and their livestock. That so many survive at all is partly due to a long-standing folk belief associating ringforts with the fairy world, which discouraged farmers from levelling them even when the land might have been usefully cleared.

Kilglassy is a townland in County Clare, a county that contains a particularly dense concentration of these early medieval enclosures. The landscape here retains much of the quiet, field-divided character that would have made it attractive to the farming communities who built such sites, and the rath at Kilglassy sits within that broader pattern of settlement reaching back well over a thousand years. Without more detailed documentary or excavation records it is difficult to say more about the specific history of this individual site, but its presence in the townland is itself a reminder that the land here has been continuously managed and inhabited across many centuries.