A cashel is a stone-walled enclosure, typically of early medieval date in Ireland, used to define and protect a settlement or farmstead. What makes this particular example quietly compelling is how layered the site has become, with later building activity literally built over the earlier, making the past legible only in outline.

The cashel at Gleninsheen is rectilinear in plan, an unusual form compared to the more common circular cashel, and within its walls there is considerably more to account for than this single hut site alone. At least three other hut sites have been identified within the same enclosure, along with what may be the foundations of a house. The hut site in the north-west corner is therefore one element within what appears to have been a fairly substantial enclosed settlement, its internal arrangements now partly obscured by the modern wall that curves across the older structure. The five-metre diameter of the underlying feature places it within the range typical of early medieval hut structures found across the Burren, the distinctive limestone plateau landscape of which Gleninsheen forms a part.