The example at Lisdeen, in County Clare, is one such site, a rath sitting in the west of Ireland in a county that contains a remarkable concentration of early medieval remains.

Raths, to give them their Irish name, were typically enclosed farmsteads built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. A bank of earth, sometimes reinforced with a ditch, formed a roughly circular enclosure that would have sheltered a family, their livestock, and perhaps a cluster of timber buildings. In parts of County Clare, these structures survive in considerable numbers, partly because the thin soils and long tradition of pastoral farming have not always encouraged the kind of deep ploughing that destroys earthworks elsewhere. Lisdeen itself is a small townland on the western fringe of the county, not far from the Atlantic coast, in a landscape that has been settled since prehistory.

Beyond its classification as a rath and its location in Lisdeen townland, the specific history of this particular enclosure, its dimensions, condition, and any finds or features associated with it, remains difficult to establish from currently available sources. What can be said is that its survival, even as an unassuming earthwork, places it in a long and largely unwritten local history that stretches well back into the early medieval world.