Caherycahill, in County Clare, contains the Irish word "cathair", referring to a stone-walled enclosure of the kind built across Munster and Connacht from the early medieval period onward. These structures, sometimes called cashels, were typically circular or oval dry-stone ringforts used to protect a farmstead, its inhabitants, and their livestock. The enclosure recorded at Caherycahill belongs to this broad tradition, a category of monument so numerous in Clare that they punctuate the landscape at almost every turn, yet individually each one carries its own particular silence and its own unanswered questions about who built it and when.