A cashel is simply a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, and Clare, with its limestone-rich terrain, has a particular abundance of them. Where timber and soil were the materials of choice elsewhere in early medieval Ireland, the Burren and its fringes produced walls, and the cashel at Gorteen is one of the county's many such survivals, easy to pass without registering quite what you are looking at.

Ringforts in general date mostly from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and were the basic unit of rural settlement in Gaelic Ireland. A farming family of some standing would have enclosed their home and outbuildings within a circular boundary, part boundary marker, part protection against cattle raids, part statement of social position. The stone versions tend to survive better than their earthen equivalents simply because the walls resist ploughing and collapse more stubbornly. Beyond its classification and location, the specific history of this particular cashel, its builders, any finds associated with it, or the details of its current condition, remains undocumented in any publicly available source at present.