A cashel is a ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, a distinction that often reflects both the local geology and the social standing of whoever commissioned its construction. These enclosures were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries, and Clare's limestone terrain made stone the natural building material for those who could marshal the labour to use it.

Ringforts of this type are scattered across the west of Ireland in considerable numbers, yet each one occupies a specific place in the local pattern of early settlement, landholding, and territorial identity. The cashel at Drumandoora is one such site, recorded among the monuments of the county but presently without detailed published documentation to illuminate its particular dimensions, condition, or history of investigation. What the name of the townland itself suggests is a landscape that has been continuously identified and named by the people who worked it, layer upon layer, long before any formal survey took an interest.