The name points to an entirely domestic use: thread was bleached here, presumably spread across the stones in the open air. That a place with prehistoric bones should be remembered not for warriors or saints but for linen work is the kind of quiet displacement that makes vernacular placenames worth paying attention to.

A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, the dry-stone equivalent of the earthen raths found across Ireland, and this one sits in a roughly circular enclosure about 29 metres across, its defining wall now largely collapsed to a height of around 1.3 metres. A gap roughly 1.4 metres wide opens to the east. The interior slopes downward to the north and is scattered with loose stones, with a large rock outcrop on the southern side. Built against the western face of that outcrop is a smaller, partially collapsed circular structure with walls over two metres thick, connected by a low stone wall running north-east to south-west back to the main enclosure. At the centre of the cashel, a roughly circular mound of stones, about 10 metres by 8 metres and a metre high, may mark the footprint of a second collapsed structure. What complicates any straightforward reading of the site is a note recorded by Broker in 1937: the inner stone structure, with its impressively thick walls, was apparently built only around 1806, put there to hold sheep. The older enclosure and the newer sheepfold have merged into something that looks, at a glance, uniformly ancient.