Peer through it and you can just make out the walls and capstones of an L-shaped underground passage, a souterrain, the kind of drystone-built tunnel that early medieval communities used for storage or refuge. Both arms of the passage extend for only a metre before they hit a blockage, so whatever secrets the place holds remain sealed. The two circular stone huts inside the enclosure are in a similar condition, their walls long since collapsed into low rubble banks, with no trace of entrances surviving. It is a site that gives away very little.

The name Cathair na gCat, meaning the fort of the cats, points to an origin as a stone-walled cashel rather than a simple earthen ringfort, though the distinction is now difficult to confirm. The enclosing bank is stony throughout, which might indicate original drystone construction later buried under earth, or it might reflect an earthen bank that was faced with masonry. Judith Cuppage's 1986 survey of the Dingle Peninsula placed the site on the western slopes of Reenconnell, below the pass between that hill and Lateevemore, and noted how thoroughly modern activity had reshaped its edges: a laneway runs along the south side, a field wall along the east, and the enclosing bank in the south-eastern half has all but vanished, detectable only as a slight drop in ground level. What survives of the bank in the north-western arc still stands roughly one to one and a half metres high on the outside face, with traces of a shallow external fosse, a defensive ditch, running along the northern sector.

What makes Cahernagat quietly remarkable is its company. Gallarus Oratory, the extraordinarily well-preserved early Christian dry-masonry boat-shaped church, sits approximately fifty metres to the west. The Saints' Road, an ancient pilgrim route crossing the Dingle Peninsula, passes less than a hundred metres to the east. The cashel sits, overgrown and overlooked, at the edge of one of the most significant early Christian landscapes in Ireland, close enough to both landmarks to suggest deliberate proximity, yet left almost entirely to the brambles.