Balliny Caher, a large cashel on a north-facing ridge in County Clare, is a different case. A cashel is a dry-stone ringfort, essentially a circular enclosure defined by a substantial stone wall, and this one appears never to have been fully abandoned. When John O'Donovan visited in 1839 as part of the Ordnance Survey's place-name documentation work, he noted with some surprise that it 'has been used since its erection, for it is inhabited at this day.' The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map backs this up, showing roughly seventeen houses within and immediately around the cashel walls. By the early twentieth century, when the antiquarian Thomas Westropp recorded it, some buildings were still occupied, and he floated the possibility that it represented 'an interesting survival of an inhabited caher with scarcely a break from early times.' Whether or not that continuity was quite so unbroken, the suggestion remains remarkable.

The structure itself is substantial. The roughly circular enclosure measures about forty metres north to south and thirty-four metres east to west, defined by a stone bank between 3.35 and 3.5 metres wide. The wall stands up to 2.7 metres high on its outer face in places, and original facing-stones survive along the western and northern stretches. The largest individual stones, some reaching around 2.1 metres in length, were placed on the eastern side, where the natural terrain offered less defensive advantage. The ridge position does much of the work on the south and west, where the ground falls away steeply. Inside, the picture is complicated by centuries of reuse: a cut-stone house aligned east to west survives in the north-western interior, and a shapeless mound of stone and earth to the north-north-west is probably the cleared debris of other former dwellings. A smaller subcircular enclosure within the eastern sector was nearly impenetrable with overgrowth when inspected in 1998. As for who actually lived here across the centuries, the historical record is patchy. Griffith's valuation of 1855 records Morans, Glinns, and McMahons as tenants, with land held by Bloods and Morans in Balliny North; by the 1901 census, the townland was home to Droneys, Collinses, and Byrnes. The townland name Balliny is thought to derive from 'Baile Uí Eidhne,' meaning O'Hiney's town, which may point to still earlier occupants. The cashel also sits at the western edge of a multiperiod field system extending across roughly eight square kilometres, suggesting the landscape around it was organised and worked over a very long stretch of time.