The one at Knockerry, in County Clare, is a rath, the term used for a ringfort constructed from earthworks rather than stone. These roughly circular enclosures, typically built during the early medieval period between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, served as farmsteads and family compounds, their raised banks and ditches marking out a defended domestic space rather than a military fortification in any grand sense.

Clare is particularly well supplied with such monuments, owing to the county's long agricultural history and the relative survival of upland and marginal land where development never erased older features. A rath of this kind would originally have enclosed a timber or wattle house, outbuildings, and perhaps a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage used for storage or refuge. The Knockerry example takes its name from the townland in which it sits, a placename of Gaelic origin like so many in this part of Munster.

Because detailed recorded information for this specific site remains limited at present, the finer points of its dimensions, condition, and history are difficult to establish with any certainty. What is clear is that it forms part of a wider pattern of early medieval settlement across Clare, quiet earthworks holding their ground in the landscape long after the communities that built them have gone.