On a west-facing slope of a ridge to the south-east of Carrowndulla Lough in County Galway, there is exactly such an anomaly: a cashel, which is a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, that breaks the usual round. Measuring roughly 23.8 metres by 22 metres, it is almost square in plan, its perimeter traced by a drystone wall that has largely collapsed and been swallowed by grass over the centuries.

The site is poorly preserved, but enough survives to read its basic layout. A possible entrance opening faces the south-south-west, and pressed against the inner face of the western wall is a rectangular stone house measuring approximately 10.9 metres by 7.8 metres. That a domestic structure sits tucked inside the enclosure wall is not unusual for cashels as a type; what is notable here is the combination of the rectilinear enclosure and the internal building, both surviving as grassed-over rubble rather than upstanding masonry. The whole sits quietly on the ridge slope, looking out westward toward the lough, the kind of early medieval farmstead that would once have housed a family of some local standing, its stone walls marking both a claim to the land and a degree of permanence in the landscape.