Raths, sometimes called ringforts, were typically built between roughly the sixth and twelfth centuries and functioned as enclosed farmsteads, the circular bank and ditch offering a degree of protection for a family, their livestock, and their timber or stone dwelling within. There are estimated to be around forty thousand such sites across the island, yet each one represents a specific household, a specific patch of ground that someone once considered worth defending and worth living inside.

Kilmoraun is a small townland in Clare, a county that retains a considerable density of these early medieval earthworks, partly owing to the relatively low levels of intensive modern agriculture that might otherwise have levelled them. The rath here would have been constructed by an ordinary farming family of some local standing, its scale and the thickness of its enclosing bank broadly reflecting the wealth and status of the household it protected. Over the centuries such sites became embedded in local folklore, often associated with the supernatural, as places where the boundaries between the everyday world and something older felt thinner than usual. Many were left undisturbed for precisely that reason, the superstition around fairy forts, as they came to be called, offering an inadvertent layer of protection that formal designation sometimes cannot.