The rath at Lisheencrony in County Clare is one such site, a circular earthwork enclosure of the kind that served as a farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. These structures, known interchangeably as raths or ringforts, typically consist of one or more banks of earth and accompanying ditches thrown up around a domestic interior, providing both a boundary and a degree of protection for a family, their livestock, and whatever small world they kept inside.

The place name itself carries some weight. Lisheencrony derives from the Irish, with "lisín" being a diminutive of "lios", another term for a ringfort or enclosure, suggesting that the fort was noted and named by the local community long before any formal record was made of it. County Clare has a particularly dense concentration of such sites, scattered across its limestone karst and low drumlins, many of them surviving as slight earthworks in fields that have been farmed continuously ever since. The specific history of this example, its dimensions, its condition, who built it and when, remains at present undocumented in any publicly accessible form, which places it in a frustrating but not uncommon category of monument: known to exist, mapped, protected in principle, but not yet fully described.