A cashel is a ringfort built from dry stone rather than earth and timber, a form particularly associated with the limestone landscapes of the west of Ireland, and this one presents a curious puzzle: its wall survives in proper double-faced condition only at the south-south-east, while everywhere else the stonework has tumbled outward into a spread of rubble averaging three to four metres wide and, in places at the north, nearly six metres across. The eastern arc, by contrast, has shed almost no tumble at all. What remains stands no more than half a metre or so above the interior ground level, which gives the whole structure the quality of a very shallow bowl rather than any kind of fortification.

The site was already old enough to be recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1842, and that early map reveals something now lost entirely: a road running south-west to north-east directly across the western interior of the cashel. That road has since gone out of use. The later Cassini edition of the map, produced in 1920, still showed the enclosure, this time marked with hachures indicating its raised form. By 1996 it was catalogued simply as an 'Enclosure' in the Record of Monuments and Places. At some point after the cashel's walls collapsed, later farmers made practical use of the ruin, building a drystone field wall along the northern arc of the old cashel wall and running further walls off to the north-east and east. An animal gap was cut at the south-east, and a probable modern gap of three metres opened at the west-south-west. The original entrance, if the surviving gap at the north-north-east is indeed ancient, measured three metres wide. What makes the setting still more layered is that the 1842 map shows a second ringfort directly abutting this one at the east, the two enclosures pressed together on level ground with a shelf of limestone pavement rising some thirty metres to the west.