Most cashels, the dry-stone walled ringforts common across Munster, sit on reasonably level ground or on a modest rise, their interiors organised around a single plane. Here, an east-west ridge of natural rock cuts across the southern half of the enclosure, splitting the interior into two distinct levels. Whoever built here did not smooth that ridge away or work around it; they built on top of it, incorporating the landscape's awkwardness into the structure itself.

The cashel occupies a break in a north-facing slope in the pastureland of Gortnapeasty, and sits roughly thirty metres across. Its enclosing wall, now collapsed to less than a metre in height, once crowned a natural rock outcrop, though the builders supplemented nature considerably on the south-southeast to southwest arc, where a man-made scarp of dumped stone rises to nearly four metres, forming the base on which the wall was raised. The external batter, the slight outward lean of the wall's face designed to give stability to a dry-stone construction, is still readable on the northeast, east-southeast, and the southwest-to-north-northwest stretches. A fosse, a defensive ditch, roughly a metre deep, runs at the base of the scarp from the southeast around to the southwest, and may continue further to the northwest. A probable entrance gap, about two metres wide, faces southeast. Taken together, these features suggest a site whose builders were making careful and considered use of what the rock offered, shaping the natural scarp with additional dumped material where nature alone was insufficient.