But the roughly circular outline, measuring 17 metres north to south and 16 metres east to west, marks it out as a cashel, the stone equivalent of the more familiar earthen ringfort. Where ringforts used banks of compacted soil and ditches to define a defended farmstead, a cashel achieved the same effect using drystone walling, a logical choice on the rocky limestone terrain of County Sligo where building material lay ready to hand in the ground itself.

The enclosing bank, now between 0.2 and 0.4 metres high and around 2.6 metres wide, survives best along its south-eastern to north-eastern arc, while much of the rest has slumped or been robbed over the centuries. The bank is composed of blocks and roughly rectangular slabs of rubble limestone, and two of those slabs remain in something close to their original positions on the external face: one on the western side, set on its long edge, and one to the north-west, set on its short edge. These upright or near-upright stones offer a faint impression of how the wall face once looked when the structure was in use, probably during the early medieval period, when cashels of this type served as the enclosed homesteads of farming families. There is no fosse, or surrounding ditch, visible at ground level, and the original entrance has been lost entirely to time and degradation.