The example at Tullig in County Clare is one such survivor, a rath, which is the Irish term for a ringfort defined by an earthen bank and ditch rather than stone walling. These enclosures were typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and served as the enclosed farmsteads of free farming families, their circular banks offering a degree of protection for livestock and household alike.

The Tullig rath sits within a county that is unusually dense with early medieval remains, Clare's landscape having preserved a remarkable number of earthwork enclosures, cashels built from the local limestone, and associated field systems. Raths of this kind were the basic unit of rural settlement for centuries, and the families who built them would have farmed the surrounding land, kept cattle, and operated within the complex social hierarchies described in early Irish law texts. The earthen bank, sometimes topped with a timber palisade, defined the boundary between the domestic and the outside world in both practical and symbolic terms.