What makes Caheravoley unusual is the combination of its scale and its particular military logic: this is a bawn, a defended enclosure typically built to protect livestock and a residence within, measuring roughly 67 metres by 48 metres and still standing to nearly two metres in height. The walls are of undressed mortared stone, solid and deliberate, and the whole structure reads less like a ruin than like a building that simply ran out of people.

The bawn's defensive intent is written into its fabric. Two circular turrets, each about 2.5 metres in diameter, occupy the east and west angles in an opposing arrangement, and between them they carry ten gun loops, narrow wall openings designed to allow a defender to fire out while remaining mostly protected. The eastern turret survives to two storeys, making it the better preserved of the pair, and beside it in the south-east wall a garderobe chute, a simple shaft for waste disposal, survives as a reminder that someone once lived here with a degree of permanence. The collapsed entrance, just over a metre wide, lies at the north-east. Inside the enclosure, a rectangular house measuring about 12 metres by 6 metres sits centrally, and near the north corner, grassed-over foundation lines suggest the presence of associated outbuildings. The whole complex is surrounded by an extensive field system, traces of which remain visible across the surrounding ground.