Later field walls have been built directly on top of it, one of them kinking outward at the north-west to create a small annexe, and another cutting straight across the interior. No original entrance survives. What makes the site quietly peculiar is the identity problem that has followed it across centuries of maps and records: the name "Caherbannagh" migrated between this enclosure and a nearby circular ringfort on successive Ordnance Survey editions, so that by 1915 the name had shifted entirely to the other monument, leaving this one, in a sense, nameless.

A caher, or cashel, is a stone-walled enclosure of early medieval Irish origin, typically associated with a farmstead or minor fortification, and the name Caherbannagh points to something more specific: John O'Donovan, travelling through the area in 1839, recorded it as "Cathair Beannach", meaning the Pinnacled Caher, and noted it was already ruinous. The antiquarian T. J. Westropp, writing in 1901, complicated matters further by arguing the place ought properly to be called "Caheragh", pointing to its appearance as "Cathrach" in the O'Brien family rentals of around 1390 and as "Cahera" in the inquisition taken following the death of Donough, Earl of Thomond, in 1597. Westropp also recorded a poem by the Clare poet Hugh MacCurtain, Aodh Buidhe Mac Cruitín (1680 to 1755), which contains the lines: "Thou melancholy singing dove on yonder blackened doon, Dismal and defenceless is the ruin on which you perch, The ruin of the noble pinnacled house of the descendant of Roigh." Whether MacCurtain was mourning this particular enclosure or the circular ringfort nearby, now also called Caherbannagh on the 1915 map, remains unresolved.

The enclosure does not stand in isolation. Around 60 metres to the south-east lies a second possible rectangular cashel with an associated field system, and two circular cashels sit further along the same slope at roughly 240 metres and 350 metres respectively. The cluster suggests a landscape that was once considerably more organised and inhabited than the rough grazing it has since become, overlooking the Caher Valley and its river below.