The rath at Gowerhass, in County Clare, is one such place: a circular earthwork enclosure of the kind that would have served as a farmstead or small defended homestead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. A rath, to be precise about the term, is a ringfort defined by earthen banks and ditches rather than stone walls, the latter being known as a cashel. Clare has an unusually high concentration of both types, partly a reflection of the county's long-settled agricultural land and its position within a region that was densely occupied during the early Christian era.

Beyond its classification and location, the particular history of the Gowerhass site remains, for the moment, largely undocumented in any publicly available form. What is known is that ringforts of this type were typically the homes of farming families of middling status, enclosed for the protection of livestock as much as people, and that they formed the basic social unit of early medieval Ireland. Many were later surrounded by folklore associating them with the fairies or the sí, which gave them a kind of protective superstition that, more than any legal designation, kept farmers from ploughing them under. Whether that tradition attached itself to this particular earthwork is not recorded.