These enclosures, known variously as raths or ringforts depending on their construction, were the farmsteads of early Christian Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. A raised bank of earth, sometimes reinforced with a ditch or stone facing, defined the boundary of a family's living space and livestock enclosure. Tens of thousands of them once existed across Ireland; several thousand survive in varying degrees of preservation, making them among the most common archaeological monuments in the country, though that familiarity has never entirely stripped them of their strangeness as landscape features.

The rath at Moy More is one such survivor, recorded among Clare's broader complement of early medieval remains. Clare itself preserves an exceptional density of these monuments, partly owing to patterns of land use that left earthworks undisturbed across centuries of agricultural change. The Burren to the north is the most celebrated example of this kind of preservation, but the phenomenon extends into surrounding areas of the county as well. Local folklore long associated ringforts with the sí, the supernatural inhabitants of the otherworld in Irish tradition, and this belief offered its own form of protection; a farmer who levelled a rath risked more than archaeological censure. Many Clare examples retain their banks and internal features intact for precisely this reason.