A 1606 legal deed refers to it as a 'tighe móir', meaning 'great house', and its dimensions, eleven metres long by just over six metres wide, place it on a par with what is considered the principal house of the cashel proper to the west. A cashel, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a stone-walled enclosure of early medieval origin, typically circular, built to protect a settlement or farmstead. Here, the southern wall and eastern gable of this house appear to physically merge with the cashel wall itself, suggesting a deliberate integration rather than a later addition.

The 1606 deed does more than name the building. It records the division of the houses within the cashel between two men, Aodh and Cosnamhach Ó Dabhoireann, and notes that the properties had previously belonged to their grandfather. That detail pushes the occupation of these structures back at least another generation, into the mid-sixteenth century, and frames the site as a place of family continuity rather than a single moment of construction. The foundations of three further houses can still be made out inside the cashel wall to the north and west, giving a sense of the compound as a small, layered domestic settlement rather than a single grand residence. The Ó Dabhoireann family, also known as O'Davoren, were a learned Brehon law dynasty long associated with this part of the Burren, and Cahermacnaghten was particularly noted as a centre of legal scholarship in late medieval Ireland.

The site is a National Monument in State Care, which means access is generally possible, and its location in the Burren landscape of north Clare places it within one of the most archaeologically dense regions in the country. The cashel and its associated structures sit close enough to the surface that the configuration of walls, including the way this 'tighe móir' presses against the enclosure boundary, remains legible to anyone willing to look carefully at what initially appears to be a jumble of low limestone.