The distinction matters. While earthen ringforts were constructed by scraping up the local soil into a defensive ring, a cashel required the gathering and laying of stone, which suggests either an abundance of suitable rock nearby or a community with the means and motivation to work with it. Clare's Burren and its surrounding districts are well supplied with limestone, and cashels appear with some regularity across the county, each one a remnant of the farming enclosures and homesteads that defined rural life in Ireland roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries.

Beyond its classification and its location in Glensleade, the specifics of this particular cashel, its dimensions, its condition, its history of ownership or excavation, remain largely unrecorded in publicly available sources at this time. What can be said is that cashels of this type were typically the enclosed farmsteads of a single family or small kin group, providing a degree of protection for livestock as much as for people. The walls, sometimes several metres thick at the base, were built without mortar, relying entirely on the careful selection and placement of stone. Many have survived in some form for over a thousand years, less because they were protected than because the effort required to demolish them simply was not worth making.