A cashel is simply a ringfort constructed from stone rather than earth and timber, a form particularly common in the west of Ireland where surface rock was plentiful and easier to work with than soil. These circular enclosures were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, and they housed families, their livestock, and whatever small structures served the daily rhythms of rural life. The fact that so many survive at all is partly a matter of material and partly a matter of the land never having been intensively developed around them.

Clare is one of the more ringfort-dense counties in Ireland, and the cashels of its interior and western reaches tend to be among the better preserved, owing to the rocky terrain that made large-scale land clearance impractical. Drummina, like many Clare townlands, carries its archaeology quietly, without the benefit of a famous association or a well-visited trail. The specific history of this particular cashel, including who built it, when it was in use, and what structures once stood within its enclosure, remains unrecorded in any publicly available detail at present.