A cashel is a ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, and these circular enclosures were the basic unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Most were farmsteads, home to a single family and their livestock, the stone wall serving as much to define territory and status as to provide any serious defence.

Clare is particularly rich in these structures, owing in part to the county's abundance of limestone, which made dry-stone construction the natural choice across much of the region. The cashel at Newmarket is one of many such sites scattered across the parish, each one a quiet marker of a farming landscape that was already well-established long before the Norman arrival in Ireland. The specific history of this particular enclosure, its builders, its period of use, and whatever finds or features may survive within it, remains to be fully documented.