Ringforts were enclosed farmsteads, typically circular, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and were the dominant form of rural settlement during the early medieval period, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. That one should persist inside the grounds of a demesne, the managed estate surrounding a great house, is itself quietly telling. Landscaping, ploughing, and improvement schemes cleared away countless such monuments across Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a surviving example within a designed landscape hints at a degree of tolerance, or perhaps simply neglect, that allowed it to endure.

Portumna Demesne surrounds Portumna Castle, a Jacobean fortified house on the northern shore of Lough Derg, long associated with the Burke family, later the de Burgh earls of Clanricarde. The presence of an early medieval enclosed settlement within those grounds suggests that the land was in use long before any formal estate was laid out, which is hardly surprising given the strategic and agricultural value of the Lough Derg shoreline. Raths of this kind would typically have housed a single farming family of some local standing, enclosed within a raised bank that served as much for the penning of livestock as for any serious defence. Over time, many such enclosures became embedded in folklore as the dwelling places of the sídhe, the supernatural beings of Irish tradition, a belief that may itself have contributed to their survival in some areas, as local reluctance to disturb them persisted even when agricultural pressures elsewhere did not.