These enclosures, known interchangeably as raths or ringforts, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries. A rath generally consists of one or more banks of earth, sometimes reinforced with stone, enclosing a roughly circular area where a family or small community would have lived, kept livestock, and worked the land around them. Tens of thousands of them survive across the island, in varying states of preservation, and Clare has more than its share.

The townland name Lackennaskagh offers a small clue to its character. The Irish word liacán or leacán suggests a hillside or flagstone surface, and scach or sceach points to a whitethorn bush, a plant that appears repeatedly in the nomenclature of early Irish settlements and carries its own weight of folklore about liminal boundaries and the otherworld. Ringforts were not merely defensive structures; they were social and economic units, and the earthen bank around one represented a household's claim on a piece of ground. In Clare, where the limestone of the Burren gives way to softer agricultural land further east and south, these features are woven into the field systems in ways that can be difficult to unpick without looking carefully at the ground itself.