The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1901, described the structure as one of "two little cahers close to the road", a caher being the Irish term for a drystone ringfort, typically dating to the early medieval period and associated with settlement or cattle management. On that basis, the site was carried forward as a cashel in the Sites and Monuments Record of 1992 and the Record of Monuments and Places of 1996. When a field inspection was finally carried out in 2007, the picture changed considerably.

What the 2007 inspection found was a subrectangular enclosure roughly 29 metres east to west and 25 metres north to south, built from a drystone wall only half a metre wide and reaching between 0.6 and 1.4 metres in height. Crucially, there were no facing stones, the deliberate coursing of worked stone faces that typically characterises genuine early medieval construction. There is loose spill around the base, entrance gaps to the south and northeast, and a small internal compartment, known as a cleat, tucked against the northern interior wall, its floor largely choked with loose stones. A remnant field wall butts up against the enclosure to the east-northeast. Taken together, these features point firmly toward modern agricultural use rather than any early medieval origin. The enclosure was most likely built as a stock pen or field boundary, the kind of practical, unmortared structure that farmers across the limestone karst of Clare were constructing well into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Westropp's misidentification is understandable. From the road, a drystone enclosure of this scale would have looked entirely plausible as a caher, particularly in a region where genuine early medieval stonework is relatively common. The episode is a useful reminder of how a single published description, carried through successive official records without fresh inspection, can quietly distort the archaeological map for generations.