A cashel is a ringfort built from stone rather than earth, a form of enclosed farmstead that was common across Ireland during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands of these structures survive across the country, each one the remnant of a family farmstead, a small defended enclosure where people kept livestock, stored grain, and lived out ordinary lives in a world that was, by any measure, far from ordinary.

The cashel at Cloghaundine belongs to this widespread but quietly remarkable tradition of early medieval settlement. Clare is particularly well populated with such monuments, partly because the bare limestone of the Burren and its fringes preserved stone structures that might elsewhere have been robbed out or absorbed into later field systems. The circular or roughly circular walls of a cashel, sometimes several metres thick, were built without mortar, relying instead on careful dry-stone construction. Where an earthen ringfort, known as a rath or lios, used a raised bank and ditch, a cashel used these same defensive and practical principles but expressed them in whatever stone the local geology provided. At Cloghaundine, the local geology was generous.