The example at Lisroe, in County Clare, is one such site: a rath, which is the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically formed by one or more raised banks and ditches, and used during the early medieval period as a farmstead or defended homestead for a family of some local standing.

Clare is especially dense with these structures, its limestone landscape having preserved earthworks that elsewhere were levelled by later agriculture. A rath of this kind would generally date from somewhere between the sixth and twelfth centuries, built not by chieftains or kings but by the middling farming families who made up the bulk of early Irish rural society. The enclosing bank defined a space for a household, its animals, and its stores, and carried social meaning as much as defensive function. Lisroe itself is a placename of Gaelic origin, and the presence of a rath here fits a pattern repeated across the county, where early settlement names and earthwork monuments cluster together as overlapping traces of the same vanished agricultural world.