These circular earthwork enclosures, built throughout early medieval Ireland roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, were the farmsteads of their age, defined by one or more concentric banks and ditches thrown up to demarcate a household, protect livestock, and signal a family's presence on the land. Tens of thousands were constructed across Ireland, and Clare has more than its share. That very abundance is part of what makes individual examples so easy to overlook.

The rath at Kildeema belongs to a county saturated with early medieval settlement evidence, a reflection of Clare's particular social and agricultural history during the period when Gaelic Ireland organised itself around the ring-fort as a basic unit of life. The townland name Kildeema likely derives from the Irish, and townlands of this type in Clare frequently preserve traces of early ecclesiastical or farming activity in their field boundaries and earthworks. Without more specific documentation available, the Kildeema rath stands as one among many anonymous survivors, its original occupants and construction date unrecorded, its banks perhaps worn but still legible to anyone who knows what to look for in a field.