The site at Cahermore is a cashel, the Irish term for a ringfort built from drystone rather than earthen banks, and while hundreds survive across the west of Ireland in reasonable condition, this one has been quietly absorbed by centuries of agricultural activity. A later field wall has been laid directly over the original enclosure along its northern to north-eastern arc, and modern gaps, one a metre wide to the east and another four metres wide to the south, have been cut through what remains of the collapsed perimeter.

What gives the site its particular interest is what lies inside it. In the north-western quadrant of the interior there is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, typically used for cool storage or as a place of refuge. Souterrains are often the most durable feature of a cashel, surviving long after the walls above ground have been robbed out or levelled. That one survives here suggests the site was occupied and functional at some point during the early medieval period, even if the surface evidence is now heavily obscured by field-clearance rubble and vegetation. Immediately to the west-south-west of the cashel, a separate enclosure has also been recorded, hinting that the immediate area may once have supported a small cluster of related activity rather than a single isolated farmstead.