These circular enclosures, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Tens of thousands of them are scattered across the Irish landscape, yet each one represents a particular household, a particular patch of ground, a particular choice made by farming families living at the edge of recorded history. The Kilkenny example in Mayo is one of that vast, quiet company.

Ringforts functioned primarily as farmsteads, the enclosing bank offering protection for livestock against both animal predators and human raiders rather than serving any serious military purpose. Inside, a family would have kept their animals at night and gone about the ordinary rhythms of early medieval rural life. The rath form was so widespread that it became woven into the Irish countryside at a density that still shapes field boundaries, placenames, and local superstition today. Many were left deliberately unploughed by later generations, partly out of a lingering association with the otherworld and the fairy folk said to inhabit them, which has incidentally preserved a great number that might otherwise have been levelled.