These circular enclosures, known in Irish as raths, were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. A raised earthen bank, sometimes accompanied by a fosse or outer ditch, defined the boundary of a family's domestic space, enclosing a house, perhaps some outbuildings, and the small world of daily rural life. Thousands survive across Ireland in various states of preservation, yet each one occupies a specific piece of ground chosen by someone, for reasons of drainage, visibility, or tenure, that made sense to them more than a millennium ago.

Urrohogal is a small townland in Kerry, and the rath recorded there represents the kind of monument that quietly persists in the agricultural countryside long after the community that built it has dissolved entirely. The earthworks of a rath could endure simply because farmers found it easier to work around them than to level them, or because local tradition attached enough significance to the site to discourage interference. In parts of Ireland, raths were associated with the sí, the supernatural inhabitants of the land in folk belief, and that reputation alone has preserved more than a few from the plough. Whether that is the case at Urrohogal is not recorded, but the survival of such a feature in a working rural landscape is rarely accidental.