They may be the remnants of earlier walls or simply spoil heaps thrown up during some long-forgotten episode of digging or clearance, but either way they form a rough oval around the cairn, lending the interior an unexpected sense of arrangement, as if the space was once organised around that central point in a way that is no longer fully legible.

A cashel is a type of ringfort defined by a stone rather than earthen enclosure, common across the west of Ireland and typically associated with early medieval farming settlements. This one sits on an elevated plateau of undulating pasture in County Clare, on ground that slopes gently eastward within a wider field system. Its subcircular wall, between two and a half and nearly four metres wide and surviving to about a metre in height, encloses an interior roughly twenty-nine metres north to south and twenty-eight metres east to west. The entrance, at the west-north-west, is narrow, less than a metre wide at its inner face, and lined with large upright stones. Inside, at the northern edge, there are the remains of a rectilinear house of indeterminate date. At some later point, a drystone wall was built directly on top of the cashel wall, running across its outer face from the west around to the south-east, suggesting the enclosure was pressed back into agricultural use long after its original function had passed. The site appeared on both the Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch map of 1897 and the 1916 edition of the six-inch map, recorded simply as a subcircular enclosure. Two further cashels lie within three hundred metres, one roughly 140 metres to the south-south-east and another about 255 metres to the south-south-west, hinting at a broader pattern of early settlement across this part of Clare.