The monument in question is a cashel, a type of early medieval stone ringfort built from drystone walling without mortar, and at just over thirty-six metres in diameter it would once have been a substantial structure. Today, both of its concentric circular walls have largely collapsed, and what survives is fragmentary enough that reading the site as a coherent enclosure requires a certain effort of imagination.

The remains were recorded by McCaffrey in 1952, who catalogued the site as number fifty-four in his survey. At that point the inner wall was best preserved along its northern to south-south-eastern arc, with some facing stones of the outer wall still visible between north and east. Elsewhere, the picture is considerably worse. No surface trace survives across the south-eastern to west-south-western section, and a field wall, presumably of much later construction, overlies the monument from south-south-west to west-south-west. A separate field wall also cuts through the interior on the eastern side, compounding the damage. The name Caherpeak is itself suggestive, incorporating the Irish word cathair, which is used in the west of Ireland specifically for a stone-built ringfort, so the landscape here has long carried the memory of these structures even as the physical evidence deteriorates.