The one at Lehinch in County Clare is among the quieter members of that enormous company. It sits in a county already dense with such monuments, where the limestone landscape of the Burren to the north and the wider rural townlands to the south have preserved earthworks that elsewhere were long ago ploughed flat or built over.

A rath, to use the Irish term that appears in this monument's classification, is essentially a ringfort defined by an earthen bank and ditch rather than stone. These enclosures were constructed roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, serving as enclosed farmsteads for families of middling status in Gaelic society. The bank offered a degree of protection for livestock as much as for people, and the interior would typically have held a timber or wattle house, outbuildings, and perhaps a souterrain, an underground passage of stone that could function as a cool store or a place of refuge. Clare has a particularly high density of such sites, a reflection of both the county's early medieval settlement patterns and the relative lack of intensive modern agriculture that might otherwise have erased them.

Beyond its classification and location in the townland of Lehinch, the specific history of this particular site remains to be fully documented in the public record. What can be said is that its survival into the present is itself something worth registering. Most ringforts that endure do so because local tradition attached significance to them, often as the dwelling places of the sí, the supernatural inhabitants of the otherworld in Irish folk belief, which discouraged farmers from disturbing the banks even when clearing land would have been convenient.