A rath, as these structures are also known, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, most commonly built during the early medieval period between roughly 500 and 1000 AD. They served as farmsteads for families of some local standing, the banks offering a degree of protection for livestock and household alike rather than any serious military defence.

Clare is unusually dense with these monuments, its limestone terrain having preserved earthworks that elsewhere were ploughed out or built over across the centuries. The ringfort at Feeard belongs to this quiet inventory of survivals, field monuments that continued to shape the boundaries and superstitions of rural life long after their original inhabitants were gone. In Irish tradition, raths were widely associated with the otherworld and with the sí, the fairy mounds of folk belief, which gave many of them a degree of protection simply through the reluctance of later farmers to disturb them. That cultural caution has saved more than a few from destruction.