Ringforts of this kind, known interchangeably as raths or lios depending on local tradition, were the standard farmstead of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. A family would have enclosed their home, animals, and daily life within a raised bank and ditch, less a defensive fortification in any military sense and more a boundary that marked out a household's place in the world. Clare has several hundred such sites recorded across its parishes, each one a faint outline of a life once fully lived.

The townland name Sheeaun is likely derived from the Irish Síán, meaning a fairy mound or small earthen hill, which points to the kind of charged folklore that attached itself to these circular enclosures long after their original inhabitants were gone. Across Ireland, raths were left unploughed and undisturbed for centuries not out of archaeological scruple but out of genuine unease; they were considered the dwelling places of the sídhe, the supernatural beings of Irish tradition, and interfering with them was thought to bring misfortune. That protective superstition, more than any formal preservation effort, is the reason so many ringforts survive at all.