That number sounds abundant until you consider how quietly most of them go about their existence, unvisited and unremarked, folded into farmland or overgrown at field margins. This one is a rath, the term used for a ringfort constructed from earthen banks and ditches rather than stone, and it belongs to a class of monument that tells us more about early medieval rural life in Ireland than almost any other surviving structure.

Raths were typically built between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries and served as the enclosed farmsteads of free farming families. The raised bank, sometimes reinforced with a wooden palisade, defined a household's territory and offered a degree of security for livestock as much as for people. They were not military fortifications in any serious sense, but social and agricultural ones, the physical expression of status and land tenure in a society where such things mattered enormously. Kerry has a particularly dense concentration of these monuments, a reflection of the county's long history of dispersed rural settlement, and Meanus adds one more quiet presence to that count.