A cashel is a ringfort built from stone rather than earth and timber, the dry-stone walls serving the same purpose as the raised banks and ditches of its more common cousins: enclosing a farmstead, marking out territory, and offering a degree of protection during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Ireland has tens of thousands of ringforts recorded across the island, yet each one represents a specific family, a specific place in a specific community, and the Knockanoura example is no exception to that quiet particularity.

The townland name Knockanoura derives from the Irish, most likely meaning something along the lines of the hill of the boundary or the cold hill, though local interpretation can vary. Clare is especially well supplied with early medieval enclosures of this kind, partly because the Burren and its margins offered good building stone and partly because the region supported dense early Christian settlement. A cashel of this type would typically have enclosed a single extended family group, with the stone wall, sometimes several metres thick, acting as a boundary between the domestic world within and the open land beyond. Interior features at similar sites elsewhere in Clare include the foundations of circular houses, souterrains (underground stone-lined passages, probably used for storage and refuge), and occasionally the remnants of small outbuildings.