That the Ordnance Survey still saw fit to mark and name it on their six-inch maps, both in 1840 and again in the 1916 edition, says something about the hold a name can have on a landscape even when the structure beneath it has all but vanished. What remains today on slightly elevated, reclaimed pasture at the floor of the Ballyvaughan valley is a scarped outline, an uneven interior, and a fieldwall running along the northern and eastern sectors, following the ghost of what was once a cashel, a stone-walled early medieval enclosure, roughly D-shaped and measuring around 40 metres by 35 metres.

The name itself has attracted more attention than the ruins. John O'Donovan, the nineteenth-century scholar who travelled County Clare recording place names for the Ordnance Survey, set it down as Caher a Mhargaidh, suggesting a cashel associated with a market. Thomas Johnson Westropp, who visited in 1901 and found only a scatter of foundation blocks, leaned towards this interpretation too, connecting the name to a nearby eanagh, an archaic term for a fair or market place. But Westropp also noted that a Dr Macnamara had offered an entirely different reading: that the second element derived not from margadh, meaning market, but from a local name for the valley itself, Glenarraga. Whether the cashel gave its name to commercial activity nearby, or simply borrowed its name from the valley it sat in, is a question the stones can no longer answer.