The one at Gortglass, in County Kerry, is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort constructed primarily from earthen banks rather than stone. These circular enclosures, built mainly during the early medieval period between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, served as farmsteads for families of some local standing. A raised bank and ditch marked out territory, sheltered livestock, and signalled social position in a landscape where such things mattered considerably.

Raths of this kind were the basic unit of rural life in early medieval Ireland, and Kerry, with its mix of fertile lowland and rugged upland, contains a particularly dense concentration of them. The townland name Gortglass, derived from the Irish meaning something close to green field or green plot of land, hints at the kind of agricultural setting these enclosures typically occupied. Most raths were home to a single extended family, and excavations of comparable sites elsewhere in Ireland have turned up evidence of timber houses, souterrains (underground stone-lined passages, likely used for storage or refuge), and the ordinary debris of farming life. Without specific excavation data for this site, the details of what lies within or beneath the Gortglass enclosure remain open questions.

Kerry's ringforts vary considerably in their state of preservation. Some survive as clearly defined earthworks visible from a distance; others have been reduced by centuries of ploughing and land improvement to little more than a faint circular cropmark. The Gortglass rath sits in a county where the land has shaped and in many places preserved these monuments, and even a partially eroded example can reward a careful look at the way the ground rises and curves in a pattern too deliberate to be natural.