These enclosures, known in Irish as raths, were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised circular area surrounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They were domestic rather than military in function, home to a farming family and their livestock, and they appear in their thousands across the Irish countryside, though each one occupies a particular patch of ground with its own local history.

Killeens is a small townland in Kerry, and like many such places it carries its archaeology at a low profile. The rath here belongs to a class of monument that was being built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, during the period when Gaelic Ireland was organised around a dense lattice of petty kingdoms and client farmers. The earthen bank of a rath served both as a boundary marker and as a practical enclosure for animals, and the status of the family inside could sometimes be read in how many concentric banks surrounded the site. A single-banked example was the most common; those with two or three rings belonged to people of higher rank.