That wall, substantial enough but relatively recent in character, appears to have been built directly onto an older spread of stones, the likely remnant of an earlier cashel. A cashel is a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, a form of enclosed farmstead typical of early medieval Ireland, and this one carries the particular interest of being built, in some sense, on top of itself. Roughly three hundred metres to the west, the Atlantic is visible across open ground.

The site's paper trail is thin but telling. It did not appear on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, only showing up on the later Cassini edition of 1915, which suggests either that it was overlooked or that the enclosure was not clearly legible at the time of the original survey. It was formally listed as a cashel in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1905, may have noted it in passing as one of "some seven or eight defaced forts at a place called Shanbally in Ballyryan, towards the sea", which at least places a cluster of such enclosures in this townland at the turn of the twentieth century. A second enclosure sits about sixty-five metres to the east-south-east, suggesting this was once a more densely occupied stretch of coastline than it now appears. A large glacial boulder, deposited here during the last ice age and left standing just outside the southern wall, adds an older and entirely unplanned layer to the site's long accumulation of stone.