That kind of landscape, where water vanishes into limestone and the ground is riddled with solution hollows and exposed rock, is karst terrain, and it is the context in which this cashel sits on a slight rise in Loughvella, County Clare. A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, the drystone equivalent of the earthen rath that was the more common enclosed farmstead of early medieval Ireland, and the two form types are sometimes found in close proximity, as they are here.

The cashel survives as a roughly circular spread of stone, internally measuring around 26 metres north to south and just over 24 metres east to west. The wall itself, now heavily collapsed and covered in scrub, still reaches a height of up to two metres on the northern side, where outer facing stones remain intermittently visible, though elsewhere it has been reduced to little more than a low stony scarp. The original wall width cannot be reliably measured from what remains, and no original entrance can be identified in the surviving fabric. A rath, a related but earthen-banked enclosure, sits roughly 70 metres to the south-west, making this a small cluster of early medieval enclosures in a single stretch of limestone country.