These circular enclosures, known variously as raths or ringforts depending on their construction, were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. A bank of earth, sometimes reinforced with stone, defined the boundary of a family's world: their house, their animals, their grain stores. Tens of thousands of them were built across the island, and a remarkable number survive, though many are so subtle in the modern landscape that they read as nothing more than a gentle rise in a field.

The rath at Laghcloon belongs to this vast, largely anonymous category of monument, the kind of site that rarely attracts scholarly controversy or visitor footfall, but which represents the ordinary texture of life in early Christian Ireland far more faithfully than any cathedral or high cross. Clare is county to hundreds of such enclosures, scattered across its drumlin fields and limestone plains, each one the ghost of a household that was once the centre of someone's entire existence. Without more detailed survey information currently available for this particular example, the specifics of its size, condition, or any associated features remain unclear, but its classification as a rath places it within a tradition of agricultural settlement that shaped the Irish countryside more thoroughly than almost any other form of human activity.