A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, and Caherconnell is one of the best-preserved examples in County Clare. What makes this particular structure quietly remarkable is not its size, roughly ten metres east to west and five metres north to south, but the evidence it preserves of real domestic life continuing inside what is, in origin, a much older type of enclosure. A lime-mortar floor, a central hearth, an oven, internal divisions: the place was not a ruin used for shelter but a functioning home, occupied well into what was already a turbulent and fast-changing period in Irish history.

Excavations, first a trial trench in 2007 and then a full excavation in 2015, revealed construction of considerable care. The walls are double-faced, built from mortared limestone slabs laid in horizontal courses with a rubble and clay core, and large contiguous revetting slabs, set upright against both the inner and outer faces of the north and south walls, give them additional stability. The entrance, just one metre wide, opened through the north wall and featured a door or doorframe of yew timber, with a raised threshold paved in limestone. At some point during its occupation the east gable was entirely replaced, suggesting a long period of use and ongoing maintenance. The house has been dated to the fifteenth or sixteenth century, possibly continuing into the early seventeenth, which corresponds to the final phase of activity at the cashel as a whole. Researchers have proposed that a family of lesser nobility may have lived here during this period. The artefacts recovered from excavation are numerous, though their precise relationship to this structure remains uncertain; the finds most securely associated with the house itself are modest: a fragment of iron nail and a corroded iron strip, possibly part of a hook or clasp.