A cashel is a roughly circular stone fort, typically of early medieval date, and the structures these depressions hint at are clochans, the corbelled drystone huts associated with early Christian monastic and rural settlement in Ireland. Their beehive shape, achieved by gradually overlapping stone courses until they meet at the top, required no mortar and no timber, which is part of why so many have survived, or at least left traces, in the Atlantic west.

The five depressions at this site are all sub-circular in plan and vary considerably in size, ranging from 4.8 metres to 8 metres in diameter. That variation is worth pausing on. A hut eight metres across is a reasonably substantial space, while one closer to five metres would have been quite intimate. Whether they served as domestic cells, storage, or some other function is not recorded, but the drystone walling visible within them links them clearly to the corbelled tradition. The grouping of several such structures within a single cashel enclosure is consistent with the pattern seen at better-known early monastic sites along the Kerry coast, where clusters of clochans suggest communal rather than solitary occupation.