A cashel is a type of early medieval stone enclosure, similar in function to a ringfort but built with dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, and typically associated with a farmstead or minor lordship. This one, Caherballagh, takes its name from the townland in which it sits. It appears faithfully on Ordnance Survey maps from 1840 and again in 1916, marked and named with the kind of quiet confidence that suggests people then still knew what it was and why it mattered. Surrounding fields were cleared and drained at some point, and the area has since been absorbed into extensive forestry plantations.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp recorded Caherballagh in a series of surveys he conducted across Clare in the early twentieth century. Westropp was a tireless cataloguer of ancient enclosures, and his assessments were rarely sentimental. He included this site in his lists of cahers in 1900 and 1905, but by 1913 he could only describe it as a "featureless ring planted with hawthorns near Lough Ballagh." It is not a flattering account. When the site was inspected in May 1999, the hillock, with a base diameter of approximately sixty metres, was so densely overgrown with scrub and gorse that it was difficult to cross at all. Surveyors noted only a few earthen bumps beneath the vegetation. Whatever stone walling once defined the enclosure has either collapsed beneath the growth or been removed entirely over the centuries.

What remains is essentially a shape in the landscape, a rounded rise that holds its outline even as the scrub closes in around it. The forestry plantations now surrounding it have altered the character of the place considerably, and there is something quietly melancholy about an enclosure that survived the centuries of agricultural clearance only to become inaccessible through sheer overgrowth.