These circular enclosures, known in Irish as ráth when defined by earthen banks and ditches, were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. A family would have lived, worked, and sheltered livestock within the enclosed space, the raised bank serving as both a territorial marker and a modest defence against opportunistic cattle raids.

Kilsarkan lies in the barony of Trughanacmy, a part of Kerry with a dense scatter of early medieval remains tucked between river valleys and upland pasture. Ringforts are among the most numerous archaeological monument types in Ireland, with estimates suggesting somewhere in the region of forty to fifty thousand once existed across the country, and Kerry has a particularly high concentration. The rath at Kilsarkan is one node in that wider pattern, a small piece of evidence for the agrarian communities that organised this landscape long before any Norman castle or post-medieval estate imposed a different kind of order on it.

Because formal documentation for this particular site is limited at present, precise details about its current condition, dimensions, or state of preservation are not available. What can be said is that ringforts in this part of Kerry tend to survive as earthworks, sometimes reduced by centuries of ploughing or boundary-clearing, sometimes remarkably intact where the land has stayed under permanent pasture. Visiting the Kilsarkan area with an eye to the fields around you, especially any circular rise or slight depression that interrupts the flatness of a paddock, is often how these places make themselves known.