In the limestone country of Ballycahan in County Clare, a possible circular cashel, a stone-walled ringfort of around twenty metres in diameter, survives as little more than an overgrown outline, its form discernible from aerial photography rather than from the ground. A cashel is essentially a ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than an earthen bank, a construction method well suited to the limestone-rich landscape of counties like Clare where stone lies close to the surface and good building material is effectively underfoot. What makes this particular site quietly unusual is its proximity to a second cashel, which sits just to the west, the two structures close enough to suggest they may once have formed part of the same settlement arrangement, perhaps a farmstead and an ancillary enclosure, though exactly what relationship existed between them is not recorded.

The site came to wider attention when it was reported to the National Monuments Service by Conn Herriott. By the time aerial surveys captured the outline clearly, the structure had already been absorbed into the working landscape around it. Field walls cut across the cashel from east to south-southwest, and further walls extend outward from it at two other points, meaning later agricultural boundaries have been built directly over and off the earlier monument. This is a common fate for low-lying stone enclosures in the west of Ireland, where generations of farmers have reused ancient stonework rather than work around it. The outcropping limestone of the surrounding pasture gives the area a characteristic bare, fractured look, which makes the survival of any upstanding masonry here all the more contingent on chance and neglect in roughly equal measure.