Two small huts in the south-west quarter of this ancient stone cashel, a circular dry-stone enclosure of the kind common across early medieval Ireland, were inhabited until relatively recent times, layering domestic ordinariness over a structure that may be well over a thousand years old. The cashel sits above the 500-foot contour on the north-western edge of a narrow spur of high ground in County Clare, with a cliff face dropping away some 400 metres to the west. Three fields radiate off the outer wall in a roughly trefoil pattern, suggesting the enclosure was not simply a refuge but the organising centre of an entire small landscape.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp recorded the site in 1905, noting with some wryness that local people had begun calling it "Caherlochlannagh", meaning roughly "the fort of the Norsemen", a name he dismissed as a late folk invention filling the gap left by the decay of genuine tradition. He was, however, clearly impressed by the structure itself, describing it as "an unusually fine and well-preserved ring-wall, beautifully built." At that time the outer wall still stood up to about nine and a half feet in the south-west. The wall was constructed in two concentric sections, each with its own dressed face and a rubble core between them, giving a total thickness of around three metres. The inner section formed a stepped terrace, though Westropp found no trace of stairs leading up to it. Inside the enclosure he recorded a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the type used in early Irish settlements for storage or concealment, as well as traces of at least four house sites pressing against the inner wall face. By 1980, when George Cunningham revisited the site, he found it much reduced from Westropp's account. The deterioration has continued; sections of the inner wall face have since collapsed into the interior, particularly to the east and south-east, though the terrace Westropp described still survives in part at the south-west, and the outer wall face reaches a maximum height of around 2.4 metres on the western side, where the vertical jointing running up through the southern stonework remains visible.