Most enclosures of Irish antiquity are circular, so a rectangular example is already something of an anomaly. This one measures approximately 32 metres on its longer axis and 30 metres on the shorter, substantial enough to suggest it was once a meaningful boundary around something worth protecting.

The enclosure was already recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, where cartographers marked it with hachures, the fine lines surveyors used to indicate earthen banks or raised boundaries. That nineteenth-century record confirms the structure was legible on the ground well before modern aerial photography made such features easier to trace. What aerial imagery from 2011 onwards has since clarified is that the enclosure belongs to an older, associated field system, one that predates the current pattern of field boundaries visible in the landscape today. A cashel is a stone-walled enclosure, typically of early medieval date, built to define and defend a farmstead or settlement, and this part of the Caher Valley turns out to be remarkably well populated with them. A second possible rectangular cashel lies roughly 60 metres to the north-west, and two circular cashels are clustered to the south-east, one at around 140 metres distance and another at roughly 250 metres. Together they suggest that the terraced slopes overlooking the Caher River were once a working, organised landscape, settled in a way that the rough grazing of today gives little indication of.