The example at Rylane in County Clare is one of these quiet presences, a rath, which is the Irish term for a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically built during the early medieval period between around the fifth and twelfth centuries. These were the farmsteads of their era, domestic spaces enclosed for the protection of livestock and family, and they are so embedded in the Irish landscape that they appear on almost every townland across the country.

Raths of this kind were not defensive fortifications in any military sense, though the banks would have discouraged opportunistic cattle raiding. The enclosed area would ordinarily have held a timber or wattle house, perhaps a souterrain, which is an underground stone-lined passage used for storage or refuge, and the outbuildings of a farming household. Clare, with its complex geology and long-settled land, has a substantial concentration of these monuments, many of them still visible as earthworks in otherwise unremarkable fields. Rylane itself is a small townland, and the presence of a rath there places it within a pattern of early medieval settlement that once covered the entire county.