These enclosures, known in Irish as raths, were the everyday farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They were not primarily military structures, despite the name, but rather defended homesteads where a family and their animals could shelter, the bank and ditch serving as much to keep livestock in as to keep trouble out. An estimated 40,000 or so survive across Ireland in various states of preservation, making them one of the most common monument types in the country, yet each one anchors a particular patch of ground to a particular human past.

Clare is especially well furnished with these remains, its landscape having retained a remarkable number from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. The townland name Ballyellery itself carries the quiet layering typical of Irish place names, baile being the Irish word for a townland or settlement, suggesting continuous human use of this ground across many centuries. Raths of this kind were generally occupied by farming families of middling social rank, the sort of people who appear in the Old Irish law texts as free farmers, holding cattle and land and owing obligations upward through a hierarchy that stretched toward local kings. The earthworks they built were substantial enough to survive not just centuries but millennia of agricultural change, which is itself a kind of testimony to the effort their original builders put into the work.