Known as Cathair na Maoilinne, a cashel is a type of ringfort defined by a stone rather than earthen boundary wall, and this one sits on the south-eastern face of the mountain overlooking Ventry Harbour and Dingle Bay. The peculiarity of the site is not in its perimeter but in what it once held inside: thirteen tiny stone chambers, called clocháns, the classic corbelled dry-stone cells associated with early medieval settlement and monastic life along this coastline. That density of small structures within a single enclosure makes it an unusually complex example of its kind.

When the antiquarian R. A. S. Macalister recorded the site in 1899, the oval enclosure measured 62 metres by 43 metres and the interior was crowded with chambers of varying shapes, circular, oval, rectangular, and D-shaped, including two conjoined pairs. None exceeded 2.66 metres in their longest dimension, and the smallest was just 1.29 metres in diameter, barely large enough for a person to lie down. A rock shelter and a possible further clochán lay roughly 14 metres to the south of the main enclosure. By the time J. Cuppage carried out the Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, published in 1986, the picture had changed considerably. The enclosure itself had become ill-defined, with only a faint bank of earth and stone surviving on the southern side and a low scarp of half a metre to one metre on the north. Of the thirteen chambers, only three mounds of collapsed stonework remained visible in the north-western quadrant. The rock shelter to the south, measuring 4 metres by 2 metres internally and partly formed by natural outcropping rock, was still identifiable, as was a short length of walling nearby that may represent part of another clochán.