Then another house. The cashel at Caherfadda in County Clare is one of those sites where centuries of activity have been quietly stacked on top of one another, leaving a landscape that takes some reading. A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, the kind of enclosure used in early medieval Ireland to mark out a farmstead and provide a degree of protection for its inhabitants. This one is circular, roughly 47 metres in diameter north to south, and it sits on a gentle slope facing west-northwest, with open views sweeping from south to north and a partial obscuring of Leamaneh hill to the west-southwest.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1913, described what he found as a ring-wall of poor coarse crag slabs nearly levelled when some houses were built in it, which captures the condition of the place with an almost resigned precision. The original wall, where it survives at the southern arc, still shows its full width of about 1.45 metres, though much of the circuit has been reduced to a stone spread. A rebuilt drystone section running from west to north still stands to around 1.3 metres in height. Cutting across the interior, a field wall runs roughly west-southwest to east-northeast, dividing the space. South of this wall, two later house structures sit on a D-shaped platform, roughly 20 metres long and 10 metres wide, its edges marked by a low dip in the ground. The 1916 Ordnance Survey six-inch map already shows these buildings within the cashel, suggesting they had long been absorbed into the working landscape by that point. The site sits within a wider field system, and another cashel lies approximately 34 metres to the northeast, hinting that this corner of the Burren was once more densely organised than the bare limestone scenery might suggest.