While earthen ringforts, known as raths, were built up from ditches and raised banks, a cashel relies on dry-stone walling to enclose its interior space. These structures were typically farmsteads, home to a single family and their livestock, and they are scattered across Ireland in their thousands, though the stone-built variety is particularly associated with the more rocky western seaboard where building material lay close at hand.

Ballysteen itself is a small rural townland in Clare, and the presence of a cashel there fits a broader pattern of early medieval land use across Munster, where such enclosures served as the basic unit of agricultural life roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The term cashel derives from the Irish caiseal, and these sites occasionally lend their name to the settlements that grew up around them, as with the Rock of Cashel in Tipperary. The one at Ballysteen is a quieter example, without that kind of later monumental overlay, which in its own way makes it more representative of how most people in early medieval Ireland actually lived.