Cathair na Maoilinne was once a substantial oval stone enclosure, roughly 62 metres by 43 metres, containing thirteen very small stone chambers. These chambers, known as clochans, are a form of dry-stone corbelled hut associated with early Christian and early medieval settlement in the west of Ireland, built without mortar and roofed by gradually overlapping horizontal courses of stone until they close at the top. What made this particular cluster unusual was the sheer density and miniaturisation of the arrangement: none of the chambers exceeded 2.66 metres in their longest dimension, and the smallest was just 1.29 metres in diameter. Some were circular, some oval, some rectangular or D-shaped in plan, and two conjoined pairs suggest the settlement had some degree of internal organisation. Whatever community or purpose these structures served, it operated on a very compressed, intimate scale.

When the antiquarian R.A.S. Macalister recorded the site in 1899, the enclosure and its chambers were still legible enough to map and describe in some detail. He noted a rock shelter and a possible further clochan lying about 14 metres to the south of the main enclosure. Today, the picture is considerably diminished. The enclosure itself survives only as an ill-defined spread of roughly 40 metres in diameter, bounded on its southern side by a faint bank of earth and stone and on its northern side by a low scarp between half a metre and one metre high. Of the thirteen chambers Macalister counted, all that remain are three mounds of stones in the north-western quadrant, their original forms entirely lost. The rock shelter to the south still stands, measuring 4 metres by 2 metres internally, defined partly by a ruined wall and partly by the natural outcropping rock beside it. A short section of walling to its east, 1.6 metres long and 0.6 metres high, may represent the surviving northern side of one of the clochans. The site sits in rough pastureland, and between the grazing, the weather, and the passage of more than a century since Macalister's visit, most of what was once here has quietly collapsed back into the hillside.