The enclosing scarp, a cashel reduced by centuries of agriculture to a low earthen edge, reaches only a metre or so on its north side and little more than that on the south. A few large stones push through the turf at the south-west, possibly the last visible remnants of what was once a stone-faced wall. The name of the townland itself, Cashel, points directly to what stood here: a cashel being a dry-stone enclosure, the Irish equivalent of the more familiar earthen ringfort, used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period.

By 1838, when the Ordnance Survey letters were compiled, the site was already being described as something that cultivation had largely removed. O'Flanagan, writing in 1927, quotes the original observation that it was 'a cashel or round fort of stone in the Townland of Cashel, which the progress of cultivation has removed.' A decade and a half earlier, the historian Knox had proposed a different reading entirely, suggesting in 1911 that the remains might represent a miniature motte and bailey work, the kind of raised earthwork introduced by the Normans as a quick-build fortification. His reasoning rested on the appearance of the word 'Mote' on the 17th-century Down Survey county map for the general area. The Down Survey, conducted in the 1650s under William Petty, was the first large-scale mapping of Ireland and sometimes recorded place-name memory of features that had long since disappeared or changed beyond recognition. Whether Knox was right is not settled: the platform sits on a natural rise, and the enclosing scarp makes deliberate use of the natural fall of ground, which is consistent with either interpretation.

Inside the platform, a poorly defined rise in ground level towards the western end may mark the location of stone building foundations that Knox also noted. A large subrectangular pit, grassed over and roughly 11 metres by 5 metres, has been dug into the north-west sector, cutting through what may be the remnant of an interior bank; a single large slab lies in its base. Whether this pit is the result of later quarrying or some older activity is unclear. A slight depression to the north-north-east of the scarp hints at an outer fosse, and a narrow break in the scarp at the north-east, bordered by the terminal of the eastern stone bank, may preserve the line of the original entrance. A spring lies about 30 metres to the south-west, and hawthorn trees have taken root along the southern and western scarp, which is the kind of slow botanical colonisation that tends to happen when a place is left alone long enough for memory of its original function to blur entirely.