Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the predominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They were farmsteads rather than fortifications in any military sense, home to a single family and their livestock, and tens of thousands of them survive across the island in varying states of preservation.

The Lanna example is recorded as a rath, placing it within this broad category of earthwork enclosures. Clare is particularly well supplied with such sites, reflecting the density of early medieval farming settlement across the region. Without more specific detail about this particular monument, what can be said is that its survival into the present, even as an earthwork eroded by centuries of agriculture and weather, represents a direct physical trace of how people in early Christian Ireland organised their domestic lives, somewhere between the fifth and twelfth centuries.