That earlier structure is a cashel, a type of early medieval ringfort built from drystone rather than earthen banks, and what remains of its roughly circular wall has largely collapsed into the ground, leaving only a low, uneven trace to mark where it once stood.

At roughly 28.4 metres north to south, the cashel would have been a modest but solid enclosure, likely surrounding a farmstead or the residence of a person of some local standing during the early medieval period. Cashels of this kind were built without mortar, relying instead on carefully stacked stone, and thousands of them survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. This one fared less well than most. The decision by a later farmer to run a field boundary straight through the site means that two distinct phases of land use now occupy almost the same ground, one ancient and largely invisible, the other more recent and still legible in the landscape.