The place is a cashel, a type of early Irish stone ringfort, and tradition recorded by Cunningham in 1980 holds that it once served those two rather contradictory functions simultaneously. Whether or not the story is literally true, it speaks to a site that accumulated uses across a very long time, and whose name alone hints at a landscape once quite different from the open ground that surrounds it today.

The Irish name, rendered as 'Cathair an aird rois' by the scholar O'Curry, translates as the fort of the high wood, a name that made sense in contrast to a lower wood in the valley of Feenagh to the east. That topographical distinction has long since dissolved, but the structure itself remains legible. It is an oval bivallate cashel, meaning it has two concentric enclosing walls. The outer enclosure measures roughly 60 metres north to south and 50 metres east to west, defined by a slab wall that survives across much of its circuit. The inner enclosure, somewhat smaller at around 32.5 metres by 30 metres, is built of thin irregular slabs and retains walls between 1.2 and 2.5 metres high on the exterior. Upright slabs still mark the east side of the original entrance through the south of the inner wall, and a small cavity in the WNW section, roughly 0.8 metres wide and deep, appears to be an alcove. An older mound wall, belonging to a wider multiperiod field system in the area, actually runs beneath the outer enclosure on the west side, suggesting the cashel was built into a landscape already organised by earlier hands. The two vernacular buildings visible inside the enclosure were likely inhabited until the Famine years of the mid-nineteenth century, and both the 1840 and 1916 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map show them clearly, named and hachured within the fort's outline.

The garth, the interior space of the cashel, is now given over to wild plants: nettles, meadowsweet, herb Robert, orchid, buttercup, ladies bedstraw, cowslip, and silverweed grow among the collapsed and partly rebuilt walls. Part of the inner cashel wall on the north and north-northeast has been replaced by a modern wall, a practical intrusion that quietly marks the boundary between the site's ancient function and its continued use as grazing land.