These circular earthwork enclosures, built during the early medieval period roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, were the farmsteads of their age, defined by one or more raised earthen banks and ditches that enclosed a family's dwelling and outbuildings. Tens of thousands once existed across Ireland; a remarkable number survive, grazed around by cattle and half-noticed by passing traffic, their original function long since traded for the ambiguous status of archaeological monument.

The rath at Tawlaght belongs to Kerry's dense concentration of such sites, a county whose relatively low levels of intensive tillage have helped preserve earthworks that elsewhere were levelled during land improvement schemes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The name Tawlaght itself may derive from the Irish tamhlacht, a word sometimes associated with plague burial grounds or ancient cemetery sites, though the connection to this particular rath is unclear and should not be overstated. What is certain is that the landscape here carries layers of occupation stretching back through the early Christian period and beyond, and a circular raised enclosure in such a setting is consistent with the pattern of dispersed farming settlement that characterised rural Ireland before the arrival of nucleated villages.