That plain statement carries more weight than it might first appear, because Ireland contains somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 of these circular enclosures, and most of them sit quietly in fields, unexcavated and unexplained, their banks and ditches the only legible trace of early medieval farming life.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the typical homestead of rural Ireland roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. A family, their livestock, and their outbuildings were enclosed within a roughly circular earthen bank, which provided both a boundary and a degree of protection. The rath at Trusklieve belongs to this broad tradition, situated in a part of Clare that lies south of the Burren limestone plateau, in a landscape that shifts between thin glacial soils and low drumlin country. Beyond its presence in Trusklieve and its classification as a rath, the documentary record for this particular site is currently sparse, which is itself a kind of historical fact. Of the tens of thousands of ringforts recorded across Ireland, a large proportion remain known only by their outline, their exact sequence of occupation, their internal features, and their local folklore still waiting to be properly documented.