These enclosures, known in Irish as raths, were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Typically consisting of one or more concentric banks and ditches thrown up around a farmstead, they housed ordinary farming families rather than warriors or kings, and tens of thousands of them once dotted the Irish countryside. Many thousands survive, degraded to varying degrees, and Clare has a particularly dense concentration of them.

The ringfort at Drumumna belongs to this vast and largely anonymous category of monument. Without surviving documentary records tied to the site, it is difficult to say who built it, when precisely it was constructed, or what domestic life it once contained. What can be said is that the townland name itself, Drumumna, derives from the Irish meaning the ridge of the river, suggesting a landscape long defined by its relationship to water and elevated ground, both features that early medieval farmers valued when selecting a defensible and practical location for a homestead. The earthen banks of a rath served less as military fortifications and more as enclosures for livestock and markers of social territory, a family's claim made visible in the ground.