A cashel is a ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, a distinction that reflects both the local geology and the building traditions of early medieval Ireland. Where soil and turf were plentiful, farmers and landowners of the period raised earthen raths; where stone lay close to the surface, as it does across much of Connacht, they stacked it into enclosures that have proved remarkably durable. The one at Curraghmore belongs to this latter tradition, a circular defended farmstead of the kind that once formed the basic unit of rural life across the country.

Ringforts in general date predominantly from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, though some were built earlier and many remained in use or were modified long after. They served as enclosed farmsteads, the walls providing security for livestock and family alike against opportunistic raiding rather than organised military assault. The cashel form was particularly common across the west of Ireland, and Sligo has a reasonable concentration of them scattered across its drumlin fields and limestone uplands. The townland of Curraghmore places this particular example within a quiet stretch of the county, the name itself suggesting, in the Irish, a large marshy plain, which gives some sense of the agricultural setting in which it would originally have functioned.