These circular enclosures, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, home to farming families of modest means as well as to higher-ranking landowners, and they survive today in various states of preservation across almost every county. Clare alone contains hundreds of them, many sitting quietly in fields, half-absorbed by hedgerows or livestock pasture, their original function long forgotten by the people who farm around them.

The ringfort at Brisla is one such site. Beyond its location in this Clare townland, the surviving record offers little in the way of individual detail: no documented excavation, no particular historical episode, no associated find that has brought it particular attention. That is not unusual. The vast majority of Ireland's ringforts passed through history without generating written records, their stories embedded instead in the soil of their banks and the silted memory of their ditches. What can be said is that a rath of this type almost certainly dates to somewhere within the early medieval period, broadly the fifth to twelfth centuries, when this form of enclosed settlement was the dominant mode of rural life across the island.