The rath at Shanganagh in County Clare is one such site. A rath, in its simplest form, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built to protect a homestead and its livestock. They date predominantly from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and their distribution across the Irish landscape tells us more about early rural settlement patterns than almost any other monument type.

Clare is particularly well furnished with these enclosures, sitting as it does in a landscape shaped by both the limestone karst of the Burren to the north and the more fertile lowland soils to the south and east. Shanganagh is a townland within this county, and the presence of a rath there fits a pattern repeated across thousands of similar place-names throughout Ireland, where a defended farmstead once anchored a family's claim to land and status. The earthworks themselves, where they survive, typically appear as low grassy banks, easily mistaken for natural undulations by an unpractised eye.