Where a typical ringfort uses a raised bank of earth and an outer ditch to define its circular space, a cashel achieves the same effect with a drystone wall, a construction method particularly associated with the rocky western counties where good building stone lies close to the surface and workable earth is scarce. The Burren and its fringes, which Clare knows well, are precisely the kind of terrain where cashels proliferate, their grey walls half-dissolved into the surrounding limestone over the course of a millennium or more.

Cashels of this type are generally dated to the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, when they served as the enclosed farmsteads of individual farming families or, in larger examples, as the defended residences of minor lords. The circular enclosure would have contained a house, outbuildings, and sometimes souterrains, which are underground stone-lined passages thought to have served for storage or as places of refuge. The name Ballygriffy, from the Irish baile, meaning townland or settlement, suggests a place with a long history of habitation, and the presence of a cashel fits that pattern. Beyond its type and location, the specific history of this particular structure remains to be fully documented.