These enclosures, known in Irish as ráth when constructed from earthen banks and ditches, were the standard farmstead of early medieval Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Tens of thousands were built across the island, and yet each one occupied a specific patch of ground chosen by a specific family, for reasons of drainage, visibility, or social standing that we can now only partly reconstruct.

The Ballingaddy example belongs to this vast, still only partially understood class of monument. A ráth typically consisted of one or more concentric circular banks, thrown up from the material dug out of an accompanying fosse or ditch, enclosing a central area where a family and their livestock would have sheltered. The interiors sometimes contain the traces of houses, souterrains (underground stone-lined passages that served for storage or refuge), and occasionally evidence of craft activity. Clare itself is particularly dense with such sites, the limestone and gently rolling terrain of the county having suited early farming communities well, and the survival rate of earthworks in pasture land has historically been higher than in areas given over to tillage.