The one at Cassarnagh in County Clare is a case in point: a rath, as this type of earthwork enclosure is known in Irish, typically consisting of one or more circular earthen banks and ditches that once enclosed a farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. These were not military fortifications in any grand sense, but rather the homesteads of farming families, the banks providing protection for livestock and marking out territory in a society where such boundaries carried real legal weight.

Cassarnagh sits in the quieter interior of County Clare, a county that contains a remarkable concentration of ringforts spread across its drumlin fields and limestone plains. The rath form was the dominant settlement type of early medieval Ireland, and Clare's landscape has preserved a significant number of them, some heavily eroded, others still carrying substantial banks. Without more detailed recorded information available for this particular site, it is difficult to say precisely what condition the Cassarnagh example is in, or whether any finds or associated features have been noted in its vicinity. What can be said is that its presence in the placename record and on the monument register places it within a long continuum of human activity in this part of the county, reaching back well over a thousand years.