This is Caherloughlin, a cashel, the term used for a stone-walled circular or oval enclosure of early medieval date, typically associated with a farmstead or minor lordly residence. What makes it worth a second look is less its current condition, which is poor, than the name attached to it and what that name might carry. The enclosure measures over sixty metres at its longest, making it a substantial structure in its original form, though the defining bank has been worn down to little more than a stony ripple, standing in places only half a metre above the surrounding ground.

The name Caherloughlin, or Cathair Lochlainn in Irish, points toward a figure recorded by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp at the turn of the twentieth century: a Lochlain, identified as chief of Corcomroe around AD 980. Corcomroe was the territory covering much of this part of the Burren, and if the association is genuine it would give the site a direct link to local power in the late Viking Age. The connection is uncertain, however, since Lochlainn was a common personal name in the Burren during the tenth century and subsequently became the surname of the dominant family in the region for generations, as the scholar Domhnall Ó Murchadha noted in 1993. Whether the cashel commemorates one specific individual or simply absorbed a family name over time is impossible to say with confidence. Within the enclosure, a rectangular house site of unknown date sits to the south-west of centre, and later field walls have been built across the interior and along the outer edge of the bank, layering the agricultural history of more recent centuries directly over whatever came before.