The site takes its name from the Irish "cathair", meaning a stone ringfort, and it is one of the more substantial examples of that form in a landscape that is unusually dense with them. A cashel, to use the term precisely, is a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, its thick circular wall enclosing a domestic space where a farming family of some status would have lived, probably between the sixth and twelfth centuries.

The Burren's thin soils and exposed limestone made it a distinctive environment even in the early medieval period, but the very same rock that made agriculture difficult also supplied an almost limitless building material. Cashels here were not exceptional structures reserved for the powerful; they were the ordinary dwellings of a pastoral society organised around cattle-keeping and seasonal movement. Caherconnell itself has been the subject of ongoing archaeological investigation and has a visitor centre nearby, which gives it a more accessible profile than many comparable sites in the region that remain largely unmarked in open fields.

The site lies just off the road between Kilnaboy and the Poulnabrone dolmen, in the heart of the Burren proper. The surrounding limestone pavement, with its characteristic grikes and clints, the fissures and flat slabs worn by millennia of weathering, frames the cashel walls in a way that makes the boundary between built and natural structure genuinely ambiguous at times. The wall survives to a considerable height in places, and the interior retains traces of the features one might expect in a site of this kind, including possible souterrains, the underground stone-lined passages that served as cool stores or places of refuge.