The name suggests a cathair, a stone-walled ringfort, yet what survives on this north-facing slope of a Cork ridgeline is something more hybrid and harder to read. On the eastern to south-south-eastern arc, the boundary survives as a low grass-covered earthen rise, barely 0.6 metres high internally. Everywhere else, a stone wall takes over, heavily overgrown and difficult to trace with any confidence. The two elements do not sit neatly together, and the site raises questions it cannot quite answer about how it was originally built and how it has changed over the centuries.

Ringforts, known variously as raths (earthen-banked enclosures) or cahers (stone-walled equivalents), were the typical farmstead form of early medieval Ireland, built roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries and used by farming families as enclosed homesteads for people and livestock. At Cathair Daithí the picture is complicated by the possibility that the stone wall was not always there in its current form. To the north, where the ridge falls away on a steep slope, stones have collapsed outward in a way that may reflect the tumbling of an earlier earthen bank rather than the wall itself. If so, the site may have begun as a conventional rath and been modified, or reinforced with stone, at some later point. The interior measures roughly 25.7 metres east to west and 21.7 metres north to south, a modest but workable enclosed space, and it sits level despite the sloping ground around it.

The site lies in pasture, and the wall's heavy overgrowth means the structural details are easier to read in some places than others. The northern section, where the possible bank collapse is visible on the slope outside, is the most informative stretch for anyone trying to understand the sequence of the enclosure's construction.