The cashel at Parkaloughan is an oval stone enclosure, roughly 80 metres north to south and 55 metres east to west, but you would be forgiven for walking past it without registering what you were seeing. A cashel is a ringfort built primarily from stone rather than earthen banks, and this one survives only as a low, spread bank of earth and rubble. What makes it particularly easy to miss is that later field walls have been laid directly over much of its circuit, running from the south around to the northwest, and again from the east back to the south. The ancient boundary and the agricultural one have become almost indistinguishable.

Ringforts of this kind were the typical settlement unit of early medieval Ireland, generally dating from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They served as enclosed farmsteads, the surrounding wall providing security for livestock and household alike. The cashel at Parkaloughan was recorded by McCaffrey in 1952, and even then it was noted as poorly preserved. The overlaying of its banks by field walls suggests that later farmers found the existing stonework convenient, raiding or repurposing the structure as they parcelled out the land around it. This kind of incremental erasure is common across Irish agricultural landscapes, where ancient enclosures were gradually absorbed into the field systems that replaced them.