Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, built roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Most were family farmsteads, defined by one or more banks of earth and an internal ditch, enclosing a space where people lived, kept livestock, and stored food. Thousands survive across the country, some dramatically preserved, others barely visible as a slight rise in a field, noticed only when the light falls at the right angle in winter.

The rath at Mountkelly belongs to a county that contains a remarkable concentration of these monuments, many of them in agricultural land that has never been intensively developed. Galway's eastern lowlands and its more sheltered inland areas were well settled during the early medieval period, and ringforts in townlands like Mountkelly would have been home to farming families operating within the hierarchical social structure of Gaelic Ireland, where the size and number of a fort's surrounding banks could signal something about the status of its occupants. A simple single-banked enclosure was the ordinary farmer's home; multiple concentric banks suggested someone of greater rank. Without more detailed field records it is difficult to say which category this example falls into, but its survival into the present is itself notable, given how many similar monuments have been lost to land clearance and development over the past two centuries.