In Irish placename tradition, "caher" (or cathair) typically refers to a stone fort or enclosed settlement, the kind of circular dry-stone enclosure that dots the limestone landscape of County Clare in considerable numbers. That the townland itself bears this name suggests the enclosure here was substantial enough, or sufficiently long-remembered, to give the place its identity entirely.

Beyond the name and its general type, the precise details of this particular enclosure remain elusive for now. What can be said is that enclosures of this kind in Clare generally date from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and served as the defended farmsteads of local farming families and minor lords. Their walls, sometimes several metres thick and still standing to considerable height elsewhere in the county, defined a world in which cattle were the primary measure of wealth and the boundary between the domestic and the dangerous was drawn in stone.