The stone fort that gives the townland its name, a cashel or dry-stone ringfort of considerable size, was for centuries the hereditary seat of the O'Davorens, a learned family who ran what amounted to a law school within its walls. In a landscape already dense with prehistoric field systems and limestone pavements, the site carried a quite specific institutional weight: this was a place where Brehon law, the ancient Gaelic legal tradition, was taught and practised into the seventeenth century.

The O'Davorens were one of the great hereditary legal families of Gaelic Ireland, and their school at Cahermacnaghten produced manuscripts that survive to this day, among them legal texts now held in libraries in Dublin and beyond. The Brehon system, which predates Norman influence in Ireland and operates through a complex body of customary law rather than statute, depended on exactly this kind of family-based transmission of knowledge. That such a school was still functioning in the early 1600s, long after the Elizabethan reconquest had begun dismantling Gaelic institutions elsewhere, speaks to the particular durability of Clare's learned families and the relative isolation that the Burren's terrain provided. The cashel itself, a roughly circular enclosure defined by a substantial stone wall, contains the remains of buildings associated with this tradition, though the structures have suffered considerably over time.