The name refers to a well-known stone fort in the area, a cashel, which is a roughly circular enclosure built from dry-stone walling, a form of settlement that was common in early medieval Ireland. But recorded alongside the fort is a separate structure, catalogued in its own right, whose precise nature remains formally undescribed in any publicly available record. Whatever it is, it sits in one of the most archaeologically layered landscapes in Ireland, where field walls, fulachta fiadh, and ring forts accumulate across the grey limestone pavement in numbers that can make individual monuments difficult to isolate or assess.

The Burren has been continuously settled since the Neolithic period, and Caherconnell itself has been the subject of sustained archaeological excavation since the early 2000s, producing evidence of occupation spanning several centuries of the early medieval period. The cashel and its associated site farm are among the better-documented monuments in the region. The unnamed structure recorded nearby may be ancillary to the fort, a souterrain perhaps, which is an underground stone-lined passage often associated with Irish cashels and used variously for storage or refuge, or it may belong to an entirely different period or function. Without further detail, speculation does little useful work.