The rath at Moy Beg, in County Clare, is one such example: 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 typically consisted of one or more banks and ditches thrown up around a central living area, providing security for a family and their livestock rather than any serious military defence.

Clare is particularly dense with such monuments, partly because its thin soils and limestone bedrock discouraged the kind of intensive agriculture that elsewhere destroyed earthworks through repeated ploughing over the centuries. Moy Beg sits within this quietly preserved landscape, a place where the shape of the land itself carries the memory of settlement patterns that predate the Norman arrival in Ireland by half a millennium or more. Without specific excavation records or documentary references attached to this particular site, its individual history remains unwritten in any public source, which is in its own way characteristic of the vast majority of Irish ringforts. They were built by ordinary farming families whose names were never recorded, and most have come down to the present as anonymous humps in a field.