At the south-western foot of Gortaclare Mountain in County Clare, set into a west-facing slope, there is an enclosure of roughly 25 metres across that breaks that rule. Known as a cashel, meaning a ringfort defined by a stone rather than an earthen boundary, it sits within a field system that spreads across the plateau above it, suggesting that whoever lived and worked here was not isolated but part of a broader, organised agricultural landscape.

The enclosure's stone wall is largely grassed over now, its outline more legible from aerial photography than from ground level, where it could easily be mistaken for a field boundary or a natural rise in the terrain. That aerial visibility is itself telling: the wall retains enough coherence after many centuries to register clearly from above, even if it no longer presents as a dramatic upstanding structure. The association with a wider plateau field system points to sustained early medieval land use, with the cashel functioning as the domestic core of a farming community that shaped the hillside around it in ways that are still faintly traceable.