It is small, around 20 metres at its longest, and barely distinguishable from the surrounding pasture. The wall that once enclosed it has long since collapsed into a low, grass-covered bank, and on the northeast side, where the ridge drops steeply toward the inlet and its fringe of salt marsh, even that bank becomes difficult to trace. What makes the site quietly puzzling is the question of what, exactly, it was built to be, and whether those two purposes belong to the same moment in time or to centuries separated by entirely different ways of living.

A cashel is a type of stone-walled ringfort, typically of early medieval date, built to enclose a farmstead or small settlement. This enclosure at Carrigskeewaun fits the general profile, occupying the full width of the ridge top and positioned in a way that closely resembles a confirmed cashel on a rocky spur roughly 600 metres to the southwest. Yet it does not appear on either the 1838 or the 1919 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which complicates any straightforward reading of its age or significance. The interior tells a different story too: it is crossed by relict cultivation ridges running on a northeast to southwest axis, which appear to post-date the enclosure wall itself. These ridges point to agricultural use in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, almost certainly by the people living in a vernacular settlement recorded on the 1838 map about 50 metres to the west. So the enclosure seems to have served at least two lives: whatever its original function, later inhabitants turned its sheltered interior into cultivated ground. On the narrow terrace just below the northeast slope, there is also a small enclosure that may represent a hut site, suggesting the ridge was used across multiple periods and possibly in overlapping ways.

The site sits amid terrain that frames the ambiguity well. Salt marsh and damp pasture border the ridge to the northwest, a lake lies to the southwest, and the ground falls away on all sides in ways that would have made the saddle a naturally bounded, if exposed, place to build. A narrow gap of about 0.8 metres in the stone bank at the west-northwest might be an original entrance, though this remains uncertain. Whether the wall was first raised by early medieval farmers seeking a defensible enclosure, or whether the ridge simply offered a convenient ready-made boundary for later cultivation, is a question the visible remains cannot yet answer.