These enclosures, known in Irish as raths, were the dominant form of rural settlement across early medieval Ireland, roughly from the sixth to the twelfth century. A rath typically consisted of one or more raised earthen banks, sometimes reinforced with timber or stone, enclosing a central area where a family household would have gone about its daily life. Thousands survive across the country in various states of preservation, and Curraghmore's example is one of Sligo's quiet contributions to that number.

The broader townland name, Curraghmore, derives from the Irish meaning "great marsh" or "great plain", and names of this kind often point to the agricultural character of the land in which early settlers chose to build. Ringforts were rarely defensive in any serious military sense; they were more likely markers of status and territory, enclosing houses, livestock, and the modest wealth of a farming family in early Christian Ireland. Their circular form was so embedded in the Irish countryside that later folklore often attached supernatural significance to them, associating them with the otherworldly inhabitants known as the sí, which made farmers reluctant to disturb them even centuries after their original use had been forgotten. That superstition, however unscientific, has preserved a good many of them that might otherwise have been ploughed away.