Where the more familiar earthwork ringforts of early medieval Ireland were thrown up from ditched soil and turf, a cashel relies on the raw material immediately to hand, and in the Burren's near neighbourhood, that means stone in abundance. The form is ancient, associated broadly with the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, when such enclosures served as farmsteads, the defended homesteads of farmers and minor lords who needed to keep livestock in and opportunistic raiders out.

Ballygriffy itself is a small townland, and the cashel it contains is one of thousands of such monuments scattered across Clare, a county whose geology made stone construction the obvious choice. Clare has one of the densest concentrations of ringforts in Ireland, many of them cashels, and each represents a node of early settlement in a landscape that was far more intensively farmed and populated during the early medieval centuries than its present quietness might suggest. The specific history of this particular enclosure, its builders, its period of use, any finds associated with it, remains undocumented in the public record for the moment, which itself says something about the sheer scale of Ireland's archaeological inheritance and the slow work of cataloguing it.