A cashel is a stone-walled enclosure, typically of early medieval date, used to protect a homestead or small settlement, and this one at Gowlane is substantial enough that traces of the community it once sheltered are still legible in the interior.

One of the four hut-sites is particularly well preserved, at least in part. This circular stone structure, built directly into the southern arc of the cashel wall, has an internal diameter of around 4.4 metres, roughly the footprint of a modest modern room. The southern portion of its wall survives to a height of nearly 1.9 metres, though the uppermost courses sit beneath a later field wall that was laid over the same ground, making it difficult to say with certainty where the original stonework ends and the later addition begins. The detail was recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, a study that systematically documented the extraordinary concentration of early remains across the Dingle Peninsula.