It is a rath, the common Irish term for a ringfort, the most numerous class of monument in the Irish countryside. These were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, enclosed by one or more circular banks and ditches that defined a household's space, kept livestock in, and marked social standing as much as they offered any serious defence. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, yet each one represents a family, a generation, a particular patch of ground that someone once chose to enclose and call home.

The place-name Tobermaing itself carries its own quiet interest. The element "tobar" is the Irish word for a well, and names of this form frequently point to the former presence of a holy well, a spring considered sacred and often associated with a local saint or pre-Christian water cult. Whether such a well still exists near this ringfort, or survives only in the name, is the kind of detail that local knowledge and fieldwork would settle. The rath sits within this named place, and the coincidence of an enclosure and a well-name in the same townland is not unusual in Kerry, where the early medieval landscape was dense with both agricultural settlement and sacred geography.

Beyond its classification and location, the documentary record for this particular site is sparse, and little detailed information is currently available about its dimensions, condition, or any associated finds. What can be said is that ringforts in Kerry were typically built by free farming families, their banks thrown up from the upcast of an encircling ditch, and that they often cluster in areas of good agricultural ground. The survival of even the name of such a place into the present is its own kind of continuity.