A rath, as this type of monument is commonly known, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically circular, defined by one or more banks and ditches thrown up from the surrounding earth. They were the everyday homes of farming families between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, and Ireland has an estimated 45,000 of them, which makes each individual example easy to overlook and yet, collectively, they represent the most visible trace of how most people actually lived during that long stretch of history.

Boyogonnell is a small townland, and the ringfort it contains is one of those monuments whose local particulars, the precise dimensions of the bank, any internal features, its condition, the family or community who once worked the ground inside it, remain to be drawn out in fuller detail. What can be said with confidence is that ringforts in this part of Connacht were typically set on ground that offered a degree of elevation or drainage, the bank serving less as a military fortification and more as a boundary marking status and enclosing livestock. The choice of site was rarely accidental, and Mayo's drumlin and bog landscape shaped where settlements could and could not take root.