The rath at Shannakea More in County Clare is one such site, a circular earthwork enclosure of the kind that served as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. A rath, to distinguish it from its stone-built equivalent the cashel, was typically formed by one or more banks of earth and accompanying ditches, enclosing a domestic space where a family of some local standing would have lived, kept livestock, and worked the surrounding land.

Shannakea More sits in the west Clare landscape, a part of the country where early medieval settlement was dense and the archaeology of that period remains present in the fields if not always in the documentary record. The placename itself is worth a moment's attention. Shannakea derives from the Irish Sean Chaol, meaning old narrow place, a description that may refer to a track, a gap, or a feature of the local topography that has long since lost its obvious form. The More suffix, from Mór, simply means big or great, distinguishing this townland from a smaller neighbouring one. Ringforts in Clare range from modest single-banked enclosures to more elaborate multivallate sites, and the county's varied geology, limestone karst to the north, boulder clay and low drumlins elsewhere, produced different building traditions and states of preservation across short distances.