Caherawoneen contains the Irish word cathair, a term for a stone-built ringfort, and the site in question was substantial enough to be mapped in 1838, recorded by the Ordnance Survey as a circular enclosure roughly 25 metres across. A cashel, to give it the English equivalent, is a ringfort enclosed by a dry-stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and in County Galway, where limestone sits close to the surface, they were a common enough form of early medieval settlement. This one, however, had already begun its long disappearance by the time anyone thought to look closely at it.

When a surveyor visited in November 1982, the site was buried under a dense growth of beech trees and briars on rocky scrubland. No surface trace of the monument remained visible. The only hint that anything had ever stood there was a small arc of upright flat limestone boulders found in the undergrowth immediately to the south-west of the mapped location, a fragment that may have been part of the original enclosing wall. By that point the structure had been swallowed so thoroughly that the 1838 map was doing more work than the ground itself. Aerial imagery from 2019 suggests the overgrowth has since been cleared, which raises the possibility that more stonework may now be exposed, though what survives after decades beneath beech roots and briars is difficult to predict.