What survives is barely legible as a structure at all: a low, moss-covered spread of collapsed stone, nowhere taller than about 80 centimetres on the outside and considerably lower within, tracing a rough oval roughly 32 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west. No facing stones are visible, no entrance can be made out, and the interior is almost entirely swallowed by dense hazel scrub.

This is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a stone rather than an earthen boundary wall. Cashels were typically built during the early medieval period in Ireland, functioning as enclosed farmsteads or the defended residences of local families of some standing. They are particularly common in the limestone landscapes of counties Clare, Galway, and the Aran Islands, where stone was plentiful and earth banking less practical. The example at Cragballyconoal was already poorly understood when it was formally classified as an enclosure in surveys carried out in 1992 and 1996, and its condition has not improved with time. Adding to the confusion, a later drystone townland boundary wall, the kind built to mark land divisions in the post-medieval period, runs directly over the older enclosure line from the north around to the south-south-east, obscuring what little remained of the original structure. The two walls have become functionally indistinguishable in places, one era of land management literally built on top of another.