Known locally as Caiseal Árd, it has the shape and basic engineering of a ringfort, the secular defended farmsteads that dot the Irish countryside in their thousands. Yet inside its banks there is a graveyard, and just to the north-east lies a holy well. That combination, a burial ground and a sacred water source within or beside an enclosure, is the signature of early Christian settlement rather than domestic or military use, and it quietly places Caiseal Árd in a more ambiguous category than its earthworks alone would suggest.

The site is a roughly circular earthen enclosure about 27 metres across, defined by two concentric banks with a fosse, or ditch, running between them. The inner bank survives along the southern, western, and north-eastern arc; elsewhere it has been reduced to a scarp. The outer bank was reinforced by stone revetment, a facing of stones laid against the earthwork to prevent erosion and slippage, but it has been partly overbuilt by a field wall on the eastern to southern side and removed altogether between the west and north. Inside, the graveyard was already being recorded as a recognised burial ground on the first and second editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the latter surveyed in 1899. There is also a leacht within the interior, a low rectangular structure of dry-laid stone measuring roughly 1.5 metres long, 1.4 metres wide, and just under half a metre high. Leachta of this kind are associated with early Christian commemoration, sometimes marking a grave, sometimes serving as a station for prayer during penitential rounds at a nearby holy well or sacred site.

The enclosure is poorly preserved and would be easy to read as little more than a grassy mound with a ruined wall. What makes a closer look worthwhile is the layering: earthwork, stone revetment, field wall, leacht, graveyard, and holy well all occupy the same small shoulder of hillside, each generation of use leaving its trace on what the previous one had built or believed.