Where a typical ringfort was raised from ditched and banked soil, a cashel is constructed entirely in stone, its circular wall often several feet thick, built to define and defend a farmstead or the residence of a local lord. The distinction matters in the landscape of the Burren and its fringes, where stone was always the more practical building material and cashels are correspondingly more common than elsewhere in Ireland.

Ringforts as a class belong broadly to the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, though many were built upon or adapted from still earlier enclosures. They functioned primarily as defended farmsteads, the stone or earthen wall enclosing a family's dwelling, outbuildings, and livestock against both animal and human threat. Ballymarkahan itself sits in a part of Clare where the geology and the history of settlement are closely entwined, the thin soils and exposed limestone of the region having shaped how communities organised themselves on the land for well over a millennium. The cashel here is one of many such monuments scattered across this county, each one a quietly legible mark of that long agricultural past.