The outer structure is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined not by an earthen bank but by a stone wall, and this one measures roughly 23 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west. Its wall has sunk almost level with the interior surface, though sections survive in the north to between 0.85 and one metre in thickness, with the inner face occasionally emerging at the east and south. Tucked into the south-west quadrant of its interior, a later oval enclosure, around 11 metres long and 7 metres wide, was added at some point after the cashel itself was established, its wall still standing to about 0.8 metres in height. The two structures share a perimeter, the smaller one pressing against the interior face of the older cashel wall, creating a nested arrangement that suggests this ground was returned to, reused, and reinterpreted across more than one period of occupation.

The site sits within what has been identified as an extensive multiperiod field system, meaning the surrounding landscape itself carries traces of repeated agricultural and settlement activity across different eras, though the cashel and its internal enclosure are the most clearly defined features in this part of the townland of Ballyelly. The structure was already recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840, and the 1915 edition of that map specifically depicted the oval enclosure in the south-west corner, suggesting it was visible and recognisable to surveyors well over a century ago. By 1996, the site had been listed in the Record of Monuments and Places, at that point classified simply as an enclosure, a label that somewhat underplays the structural complexity of what remains on the ground.