It is neither. The structure at Saintclerans is a cashel, a type of ringfort built from dry-laid stone rather than an earthen bank, and while thousands of such enclosures once defined the early medieval Irish countryside, this one has sunk so quietly into its surroundings that only the geometry gives it away. The circle measures 26.7 metres in diameter, and at its most legible point, along the southern arc, the wall still stands to a height of roughly half a metre with a width of just over one and a half metres. Elsewhere it has subsided into little more than a grassed-over stony ridge.

Cashels functioned as enclosed homesteads, their stone walls serving the same purpose as the earthen raths built across Ireland during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, protecting a family, their livestock, and their small agricultural world from the immediate hazards of the landscape and of neighbouring communities. The Saintclerans example has not fared well against time and farming. Rubble cleared from surrounding fields has been heaped against the eastern and western sections of the enclosing wall, obscuring whatever original profile it once had, and hawthorn bushes have colonised the perimeter. The site is noted in McCaffrey's 1952 survey and in Waddell's 1977 study of the region, suggesting it has been known to archaeologists for decades without attracting much broader attention, which is perhaps fitting for a monument this unassuming.