Where the more familiar earthwork ringfort was shaped from the landscape itself, a cashel was constructed, stone laid upon stone to form a roughly circular enclosure. These structures date broadly to the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and served primarily as farmsteads, the defended homes of farming families rather than the fortresses their imposing walls might suggest.

The cashel at Kilvoydan belongs to a county already dense with such monuments. Clare's geology, particularly in its limestone-rich north and west, made stone a more practical building material than turf or clay, and so cashels appear here with some frequency, each one a remnant of a farming landscape that persisted for centuries before it was overtaken or absorbed by later land use. The specific history of this particular site, its builders, its period of occupation, and the degree to which it survives intact, remains to be fully documented in the public record.

What can be said with confidence is that the monument is classified as a cashel-type ringfort, placing it within one of the most significant categories of early medieval field monument in Ireland. Kilvoydan itself is a small rural townland, and the cashel sits within that quiet agricultural setting, which is, in its own way, entirely appropriate. These enclosures were always working places, embedded in farmed land, and many of those that survive do so because the ground around them has continued to be worked rather than disturbed.