A rath, as this type is known, is a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically defined by one or more banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They served as farmsteads for prosperous farming families, the bank and ditch providing as much a mark of status as a practical boundary against livestock straying or neighbours encroaching.

Clare is particularly dense with these structures. The county's limestone landscape, which resisted deep ploughing for centuries, allowed many raths to survive intact where elsewhere they were levelled for agriculture. Furroor itself is a small rural townland, and the presence of a rath there fits a wider pattern of early medieval settlement across the region, where such enclosures were the basic unit of landholding and domestic life. The people who built and inhabited them were farmers, and sometimes minor lords, living within a Gaelic social order that placed enormous importance on the defended homestead as a symbol of independence and standing.