It is easy to pass off as a natural feature of the limestone landscape, and yet it represents something older and more deliberate: a cashel, the dry-stone equivalent of an earthen ringfort, built to enclose a farmstead or dwelling within a circular stone wall. This particular example, at Cahermakerrila, is modest in scale, roughly 23 metres across its longest axis, and time has not been kind to it. The original bank has slumped to little more than a grassy mound, its facing stones long since swallowed by turf and collapse.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1915, had an arresting theory about what the structure once was. He described it as a "little house ring" and floated the idea that it may have functioned as a bawn, an enclosed yard designed not to keep people out but to keep wolves in check, protecting livestock from predation. The wall, he noted, stood only about three feet high and was rarely more than six feet thick, built of large blocks with no filling between them. That plainness of construction is still visible today, where a later dry-stone wall, standing between 1.2 and 1.4 metres high, has been added directly on top of the original collapsed bank, running around almost the entire circuit. A wide gap on the north-west side, eight metres across, looks like a later alteration rather than the original entrance. The whole structure sits within a larger multi-period field system, and collapsed field walls from that network abut the cashel on its north-east and north-west sides, suggesting centuries of agricultural activity layering itself around and over the earlier enclosure. The site appeared on Ordnance Survey mapping as early as the 1897 twenty-five-inch edition, and was still being recorded on Robinson's map in 1977.