These circular enclosures were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries, and the stone-built variety tends to survive in areas where good building material lay close to the surface. Clare, sitting on the limestone plain of the Burren's southern fringes, is well-suited to such construction, and cashels of this kind are scattered across the county in varying states of preservation.

The Dromoland example occupies a landscape that has been shaped and reshaped over many centuries. The demesne itself has long been associated with the O'Brien family, descendants of the high king Brian Boru, and the grounds contain traces of occupation and activity reaching back well before the present castle, which dates in its current form to the nineteenth century. A cashel predating the demesne's formal landscaping by perhaps a thousand years or more would have functioned as the enclosed homestead of a farming family of some local standing, the stone walls serving both as a boundary marker and a means of protecting livestock. That such a structure survives at all within a managed estate landscape is itself quietly notable, since demesne improvement works across Ireland swept away a great many earlier monuments during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.