The rath at Trusklieve in County Clare is one such place, a circular earthwork enclosure of the kind that served as a farmstead, a seat of local authority, or simply a defended homestead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. A rath, to be precise, is the earthen variant of the ringfort, defined by a raised bank of soil and a corresponding outer ditch, as opposed to the stone-built cashel or caher more commonly found across the limestone terrain of Clare.

Trusklieve itself is a small townland in Clare, and like so many of its neighbours it carries the quiet archaeology of a rural landscape that has been continuously settled for well over a millennium. Ringforts in this part of Munster were typically the homes of free farmers, the bóaire class of early Irish society, who enclosed their dwellings and livestock against both animal predators and human rivals. The earthen banks would once have been topped with a timber palisade, and the interior would have contained a house, perhaps a souterrain (an underground stone-lined passage used for storage or refuge), and ancillary structures. Whether any such features survive at Trusklieve is not currently documented in the public record.

Clare has an unusually dense concentration of these monuments, partly because the county's pastoral farming tradition meant large-scale tillage rarely disturbed the ground to the same degree it did elsewhere. Many raths survive here as low, grass-grown rings that are easy to miss from a road but suddenly legible once you are standing at the right angle in the right light.