This is the logic of the promontory fort, one of the more elegant solutions in the Irish Iron Age repertoire: where cliffs and inlets provide natural defence on three or more sides, a single rampart or series of earthen banks across the neck of the promontory was all that separated a defended interior from the wider landscape. The result is a form of enclosure that reads as dramatic even in ruin, the remaining earthworks cutting across the headland like a boundary between the ordinary world and something more deliberate.

Promontory forts of this coastal type are found in some numbers along the western seaboard, where the geology obliges with fractured limestone edges and sudden drops to the Atlantic. Clare has several examples, and while the specifics of Cloghaunsavaun remain imperfectly documented, the site belongs to a tradition generally associated with the later prehistoric and early medieval periods, roughly the last few centuries before the common era through to perhaps the first millennium. Who used them and how is not always clear. Some may have served as defended settlements, others as temporary refuges or places of storage and trade. The coastline itself would have been a corridor as much as a boundary in those centuries, with sea travel often more practical than overland routes through bog and woodland.