A cashel is a dry-stone ring fort, and Cahermacnaghten is one of the more historically layered examples in Ireland. The building in question occupies the north-eastern portion of the enclosure, its footprint modest, roughly four and a half metres by four metres, with the western and southern walls still traceable at ground level. At least four other houses once shared this enclosed space, their remains distributed around the southern interior.

A legal deed from 1606 records the division of these houses between two men, Aodh and Cosnamhach Ó Dabhoireann, and the document goes a step further by noting that the properties had already belonged to their grandfather. That detail pushes the occupation back at least another generation, lending weight to the sixteenth-century date assigned to the structures. The Ó Dabhoireann family, anglicised as O'Davoren, were among the most prominent Brehon lawyers in early modern Ireland, and Cahermacnaghten was their law school, a place where the old Gaelic legal tradition was still being taught and practised even as Tudor administration was tightening its grip on the country. The small scale of these individual buildings, huddled together inside the cashel's protective wall, fits the pattern of a working institutional compound rather than a single household.