This is a cashel, a type of ringfort built from dry-stone rather than earthen banks, and its roughly circular footprint, measuring approximately 35.5 metres east to west and 33.5 metres north to south, places it at a respectable size for an Early Medieval settlement enclosure of this kind.

What makes the site particularly interesting is the way its builders worked with the landscape rather than against it. From the south around to the north-north-west, a natural craggy bluff does much of the defensive work, reducing the need for construction on those exposed flanks and suggesting that whoever chose this location had a careful eye for ground. The cashel sits within a large, multi-period field system, meaning the agricultural landscape around it accumulated over many centuries, perhaps millennia, with boundaries and enclosures layered one upon another across the limestone terrain so characteristic of north Clare. Aerial imagery has been the primary means of reading the site clearly, revealing the subcircular wall line through the encroaching vegetation in a way that ground-level inspection alone would struggle to achieve.