The word caher, or cathair in Irish, typically refers to a stone ringfort, a type of circular enclosure built from dry-stone walling and used from the early medieval period onward as a farmstead or place of refuge. They are common enough across the west of Ireland, yet each one occupies its own particular ground, shaped by whoever raised its walls and whatever pressures, agricultural or otherwise, made enclosure seem worthwhile.

Beyond the name and its general category, the specific history of this site remains largely unrecorded in publicly available sources. What can be said is that the townland name Carrowkeel derives from the Irish An Ceathrú Caol, meaning the narrow quarter, a reference to the old Gaelic system of land division in which a ceathrú, or quarter, was a standard unit of landholding. That both the fort and the townland carry archaic Gaelic names suggests a landscape that has been continuously identified, divided, and named over many centuries, even where the documentary record thins out.