A rath, or ringfort, is one of the most common monument types in Ireland, a roughly circular enclosure formed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, as a farmstead and place of security for a family of some local standing. There are estimated to be around forty thousand of them across the country, yet each one marks a specific place where someone chose to settle, farm, and defend what was theirs.

Kerry has a particularly dense concentration of these sites, a reflection of the county's long-settled agricultural land and the relative absence of later intensive development that might have erased them. The townland name Kilmore, from the Irish Cill Mhór meaning great church, suggests this was also an area of early ecclesiastical significance, and it was common in early medieval Ireland for ringforts and church sites to exist in close proximity, the secular and the sacred organised around the same farming communities. The earthworks of a rath would originally have enclosed a house or houses, animal pens, and perhaps a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage used for storage or refuge, though what survives at any individual site depends greatly on centuries of agricultural use and land management since.