A cashel is a ringfort built from stone rather than earth and timber, the walls enclosing a roughly circular space that would once have sheltered an early medieval farmstead, its family, and their livestock. Thousands of these structures survive across Ireland, yet each one occupies a specific patch of ground for reasons that made sense to the people who chose to build there, close to water, or on a slight rise, or at the edge of workable land.

The townland of Keevagh lies in County Clare, a county whose karst limestone geology made stone an obvious and abundant building material, which may help explain why cashels are relatively common in this part of the west of Ireland. The early medieval period in Ireland, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth century, saw ringforts of all kinds serve as the basic unit of rural settlement, with wealthier or more prominent families sometimes building in stone rather than constructing the earthen raths more typical of other regions. Beyond its classification and its location, the particular history of this cashel, its builders, its occupation, and any finds associated with it, remains to be fully documented.