Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the standard farmstead enclosures of early medieval Ireland, typically circular in plan and defined by one or more banks and ditches. They were not military fortifications in any grand sense but rather the everyday domestic spaces of farming families, enclosing a house, outbuildings, and sometimes animal pens. Kerry has an unusually dense concentration of them, the county's terrain having preserved many examples that elsewhere were levelled by later agricultural improvement.

The Kilmurry example belongs to this broader pattern of early medieval settlement across Munster, though the particular details of its construction, its number of enclosing banks, its internal features, and any associated finds remain undocumented in publicly available form at present. What can be said is that raths of this type were generally built and occupied between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, and that their survival in the Irish countryside is often a matter of luck combined with the reluctance of later farmers to disturb earthworks that carried, in folk tradition, a certain uneasy reputation. Many ringforts became associated with the fairies, a belief that served, incidentally, as effective if informal protection against the plough.