In Irish, caher, or cathair, refers to a stone ringfort, a roughly circular enclosure bounded by dry-stone walls, built most commonly during the early medieval period as a defended farmstead or small settlement. That the place carries this name at all suggests a landscape with a long memory, one where the presence of an ancient enclosure was significant enough to become the name by which the townland itself came to be known.

Beyond the name, the documentary record for this particular site is thin. The enclosure at Caherfurvaus, in County Galway, is a recorded monument, acknowledged in the national inventory of archaeological sites, but the specific details that would normally accompany such a listing, its dimensions, its condition, any associated finds or features, have not yet been made publicly available. What can be said in general terms is that enclosures of this type are a defining feature of the Irish early medieval landscape, dating broadly from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They range from modest earthen ringforts to more substantial stone-walled cahers, and were typically the homes of farming families of varying social rank. County Galway, particularly in its western reaches, retains a remarkable density of such sites, many of them still visible as earthworks or stone remains in fields that have never been ploughed.

The townland name, combining the caher element with what may be a personal name or territorial descriptor in the second part, is itself a piece of evidence. Place names in Ireland frequently preserve traces of features that have long since eroded or become overgrown, and Caherfurvaus is the kind of name that archaeologists and historical geographers take seriously when trying to map the distribution of early settlement across the west of Ireland.