The example at Drinagh in County Clare is one such site: a rath, which is the Irish term for a roughly circular earthwork enclosure built up from a raised bank and internal ditch, typically dating to the early medieval period between roughly 500 and 1000 AD. These structures were the farmsteads of their era, home to families of middling social rank, and Clare, with its limestone plains and complex patchwork of townlands, contains a considerable number of them.

Raths were not forts in any military sense, despite the name that later centuries attached to them. The bank and ditch were more likely intended to mark social and legal boundaries, to pen livestock overnight, and to signal the status of whoever lived within. In folklore, ringforts became strongly associated with the supernatural, particularly with the fairies, which meant many survived agricultural clearance simply because local communities were reluctant to disturb them. Drinagh as a placename is relatively common in Munster and may derive from the Irish word for blackthorn, pointing to the kind of scrubby, boundary-marking vegetation that would once have been deliberately planted along earthwork banks to reinforce them.

Beyond its classification and location, the documented record for this particular site is currently sparse, and little specific detail about its dimensions, condition, or history of investigation is presently available. What can be said is that it occupies a part of Clare where early medieval settlement was dense, and where the underlying limestone geology made for well-drained, workable land that early farmers valued. For anyone passing through the area with an interest in the early medieval landscape, the townland of Drinagh is worth a slow look.