To a casual eye it reads as little more than a gentle rumple in the ground, but those dimensions trace the footprint of what was once the principal dwelling of the entire settlement.

A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, and within such enclosures the main residence was known in Irish as the tighe móir, literally the big house. The building at Caherwalsh fits that role precisely. Scholarly work on the site places it in the late medieval period, possibly occupied as late as the second half of the seventeenth century, and its proportions have been assessed as typical of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century domestic construction in the region. Westropp noted the structure as far back as 1897, and it has since been examined in detail by FitzPatrick and others, each reading the same denuded walls as the social and architectural centre of the cashel complex. The fact that it sits in the southern centre of the enclosure is itself significant; positioning within a ringfort was rarely arbitrary, and the tighe móir typically commanded the most sheltered and prominent internal space.