On an exposed SSW-facing slope of a gentle ridge in Ballyelly, County Clare, sits just such an anomaly: a cashel, which is a ringfort defined by a drystone rather than earthen boundary, whose walls enclose a near-perfect rectangle measuring 30.5 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west. The walls themselves vary in thickness from 0.65 to 1.5 metres and still stand between 1.1 and 2 metres on the exterior face. Most strikingly, the NE corner does not meet at a sharp angle but curves outward slightly, a detail that sets it apart from the strict geometry the rest of the structure implies.

The cashel sits within what appears to be a multiperiod field system, meaning layers of agricultural and settlement activity from different eras overlap across the same landscape. The structure was already notable enough to be hachured on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 and was again marked on the 1915 edition, though by 1996 the official record was cataloguing it only as a generic enclosure. Its proper character came into sharper focus in recent scholarship: Bowmer's 2019 study of rectilinear drystone cashels placed it among a group of similar square or rectangular enclosures associated with the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. The walls at the east and south sides are thought to be of more modern construction, which means what survives as authentically early medieval is concentrated along the western stretch and that gently curving corner to the northeast. Roughly 40 metres to the SSW stands a second cashel, making this a relatively rare instance of two such enclosures in close proximity on the same hillside.