A cashel is a type of ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, a construction method well suited to the rocky terrain of the west of Ireland, where loose stone was plentiful and soil thin. These enclosures were typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and served as farmsteads for individual family groups, their circular walls offering protection for livestock and household alike.

Brackloon itself is a small townland in Mayo, a county whose landscape holds a considerable density of such monuments, many of them poorly documented and some known only to the farmers whose land surrounds them. The cashel form was favoured particularly in Connacht and Munster, where the geology lent itself to stone construction, and examples range from modest enclosures barely visible above ground to substantial walled structures several metres high. Without further detail on this particular site, what can be said is that its classification as a cashel places it within that long tradition of early medieval settlement, a category of monument that transformed the Irish countryside and whose builders left few written records of their own.