Sitting on a gentle south-facing slope in Noughaval, County Clare, the cashel known at various points as Cahercutteen, Cathair-a-cuiteen, Knockcutteen, and, somewhat improbably, Knicknocktheen, looks out across pasture towards Liscannor Bay some fifteen kilometres to the south-west. A cashel is a type of ringfort defined by its stone construction rather than an earthen bank, and this one is circular, with an external diameter of forty-five metres and walls between three and three-point-eight metres thick, built with large facing-stones on both sides and a rubble core between them.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1909, traced the name back to a patent granted in 1610 to Donough, the great Earl of Thomond, where it appeared in several garbled forms including Cahirnegotten and Carriowenchotten. He translated all the recognisable variants as meaning roughly "the stone fort of the Common" of Noughaval. Westropp also described the structure as finely built, with a slight outward lean to the wall faces, a narrow interior ledge, and three flights of steps made of large blocks leading up to the wall-top. That south-facing entrance, which opened through a stone-lined passageway, was still intact when he examined it, but was already a casualty of practicality by 1875 or shortly after, when the lintels were thrown down to let cattle pass through more easily. All three stairways survive on the inner wall-face, positioned at east, south-south-east, and north-north-west, and the entrance at the south-east, though blocked at its outer edge, remains well defined. Inside the enclosure, just west of centre, there is a small cairn about four-point-eight metres across and a metre high, its date and purpose unknown. The site is further complicated by the presence of a second unclassified cairn roughly eighteen metres to the south, a hut site about thirty-seven metres to the south-south-west, and a megalithic structure around sixty metres to the south-south-east, suggesting that the cashel was not an isolated feature but part of a wider cluster of activity in this corner of the Burren fringe.