This is the essential logic of a promontory fort: use the sea cliffs as your walls on three sides, and defend only the one approach that land provides. Cloghaunsavaun preserves this arrangement, a coastal enclosure whose builders understood the geometry of the headland as thoroughly as any military engineer.

Promontory forts of this kind are found all along the western seaboard of Ireland, and most date to the Iron Age, roughly the last few centuries before and after the turn of the first millennium. They are thought to have served various purposes, from defended settlements and refuges in times of raiding to places of storage or seasonal occupation. The name Cloghaunsavaun, rooted in Irish, follows a pattern common in Clare townland nomenclature, where elements like clochán (a stone structure or stepping stones) and other descriptive terms have been worn smooth by centuries of anglicisation. The fort at this location sits within a county whose Atlantic edge is dense with such earthworks, many of them poorly documented and seldom visited.