The one at Kildaree, in County Galway, is a rath, the term used for an earthen ringfort, as distinct from a cashel, which is built from stone. A rath typically consists of one or more circular banks and ditches, enclosing a domestic space where an early medieval family, probably of some local standing, would have farmed, kept livestock, and gone about the ordinary work of life sometime between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries.

Raths were not primarily military structures. The banks served to define status and territory as much as to defend against attack, and the enclosed area would have contained a house or houses, storage pits, and perhaps a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage used for cool storage or as a refuge. Kildaree itself is a place-name with ecclesiastical associations, derived from the Irish "Cill" meaning church, suggesting the wider townland may have had an early Christian presence alongside whatever secular settlement the ringfort represents. That layering of religious and domestic life within a small area is typical of the early medieval Irish countryside, where a rath and a small church might coexist within comfortable walking distance of one another.