The closeness of the two is not incidental; it points to one of the more common ambiguities in Irish field archaeology, where ancient and modern land use have become so entangled that separating them is genuinely difficult.

A cashel is a type of early medieval ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, typically enclosing a farmstead or a person of local status. The example at Cragagh follows that general form: a subcircular area roughly 23 metres across, enclosed by a drystone wall built of medium-sized stone rubble with some larger boulders worked into the fabric. The wall varies considerably in width, between one and nearly two metres, and in height, reaching up to 1.85 metres on the exterior at the north-east. Its outline is irregular, conforming to the uneven contours of the ridge rather than describing a neat circle. Beneath the visible wall, on both its inner and outer faces, a low sod-covered stony plinth protrudes at ground level, which may represent the remains of an earlier phase of construction. There are two gaps in the wall, one roughly a metre wide at the east and a wider one of about 2.3 metres at the south-west, though whether either was ever a formal entrance is uncertain. Several modern field walls now intersect with the enclosing wall, making it harder still to read the structure clearly. The northern arc of the inner face is low and tumbled, and a poorly preserved six-metre section at the south-west has suffered further. The fundamental question the site raises is whether what survives is substantially original, or whether the wall was largely rebuilt at some later point to function as a convenient field enclosure for the adjacent farmstead. The answer, for now, remains open.