The site sits in Ballyallaban in County Clare, just east of the larger cashel known as Cahermore, and the ground drops away sharply to the east, giving the place a slightly tilted, half-hidden quality that makes it easy to overlook even when you are standing close to it.

A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, the dry-stone equivalent of the more familiar earthen rath, and this example was noted by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp in 1901, who recorded it as the foundation of an oval caher in what was then open pasture. The structure itself is a subcircular enclosure measuring roughly 26 metres east to west and 22 metres north to south, defined by a broad bank of earth and stone ranging between three and six metres wide and standing to just under a metre in height. A gap of about 3.6 metres on the west-southwest side is thought to represent the original entrance, the point through which people and livestock would have passed during the early medieval period when such enclosures were in active use. A later field boundary wall cuts across the enclosing bank from the northwest around to the southeast, a reminder that the landscape continued to be divided and reorganised long after the cashel itself fell out of use. The site appeared on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, and was still legible enough to be marked with hachuring on the Cassini edition of 1916, though the hazel growth that now dominates has come on considerably since either survey was made.