These circular enclosures, known in Irish as raths, were the standard farmstead of early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches thrown up around a dwelling and its immediate yard. Tens of thousands once existed across the island, and a remarkable number survive, though most occupy a strange middle ground between visibility and anonymity.

Knockanoura's rath is one such site. Clare is a county unusually dense with early medieval remains, its thin limestone soils having discouraged the kind of deep agricultural clearance that obliterated so many comparable monuments elsewhere. Raths of this kind were generally built and occupied between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, serving as the protected homesteads of farming families across a highly localised social structure. The enclosing bank was less a fortification in any military sense and more a declaration of boundary, a way of separating the domestic interior from the wider world of fields and bog and neighbouring settlement.