The example at Cloonmore in County Clare is one such site: a rath, which is the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically defined by one or more banks and ditches, that served as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. These were not military fortifications in the grand sense but rather the homes of farming families, the banks marking social as much as physical boundaries.

Clare is particularly rich in this kind of monument, its landscape shaped by centuries of Gaelic settlement patterns that left raths dotting pasture and hillside alike. The townland of Cloonmore, whose name derives from the Irish cluain mór, meaning large meadow or pasture, suggests the kind of fertile, open ground that early medieval communities sought out when choosing where to build and farm. Without more detailed excavation records in circulation, the specific history of this particular enclosure, its construction date, the family or families who occupied it, and how long it remained in use, remains open. What can be said is that its survival into the present, even in partial form, reflects how deeply these earthworks became embedded in the agricultural landscape, often avoided by later farmers out of superstition, since raths were long associated in folk tradition with the otherworld and the fairy folk.