The interior of the ring-barrow, a circular earthen enclosure of the kind typically raised over Bronze Age burials, is now used as a rubbish dump. A modern field wall cuts across a significant portion of its bank, running from the north-northeast through east to the south-southwest, and the features that earlier observers recorded in some detail have since become invisible at ground level.

A ring-barrow consists of a central mound enclosed by a surrounding earthen bank, often with a ditch between the two. This one measures twenty-four metres in overall diameter, with a central mound of roughly six metres across. When McCaffrey visited and documented the site in 1952, he recorded considerably more: an entrance gap at the southwest, an internal bank, and two ditches within the interior. By the time of a later site visit, none of those features could be made out. The combination of agricultural activity, the imposition of the field wall, and the accumulation of dumped material has effectively buried the legible archaeology beneath more recent disturbance.

What remains is a site that illustrates a familiar tension in the Irish landscape, where prehistoric monuments survive not because they have been protected but because they were, for a time, simply inconvenient to remove. At Carheen, that inconvenience eventually gave way to convenience of a different kind.