It is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common type of monument surviving in the Irish countryside. These circular enclosures, defined by one or more banks and ditches, were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands of them remain, in varying states of preservation, scattered across almost every county. The sheer number of them is part of what makes each individual example so easy to overlook.

Ringforts functioned primarily as enclosed farmsteads rather than military fortifications, despite the word fort suggesting otherwise. A family and their livestock would have lived within the bank, which offered protection from wolves and rival neighbours rather than from any organised army. The earthen banks were often topped with a timber palisade, long since vanished. Inside, the traces of wooden post-built houses, souterrains (underground stone-lined passages used for storage or refuge), and domestic activity have been recovered at excavated sites across Ireland. Clare, sitting at the western edge of the island with its complex geology of limestone karst and fertile glacial soils, contains a significant number of such sites, and the townland of Leckaun is among those recorded as holding one.