Known as Caher Murphy, or Cathair Mhurfaí in Irish, the site is an oval cashel, a type of dry-stone ring fort, whose interior has been almost entirely consumed by these conjoined clocháns, the corbelled stone huts characteristic of early Christian and early medieval Ireland. One of them connects, via a souterrain, to a hidden chamber running beneath the cashel wall itself. A souterrain is an underground passage, typically used for storage or as a place of refuge, and the engineering required to thread one beneath a standing defensive wall speaks to the considerable ambition of whoever built this place.

Restoration work carried out by the Office of Public Works during the nineteenth century altered the site considerably, and it is difficult now to know precisely how much of what stands reflects its original form. The restoration did, however, yield discoveries. An elaborate cross-slab came to light during the work and is now held in the National Museum of Ireland. A fragment of the upper stone of a rotary quern, used for grinding grain, was also found lying loose within the cashel. These objects point towards a community that was both literate in the Christian symbolic tradition and engaged in the ordinary domestic business of producing food. One of the individual huts, entered from the north-north-west side of the first clocháun, measures roughly 4.2 metres by 3.6 metres internally. Its drystone walls, slightly corbelled inward as they rise, survive to about 1.6 metres. A paved entrance passage leads in, with a low sill stone at the inner threshold. At the south-west, there is a second, much smaller opening at the base of the wall, only around sixteen centimetres high, whose purpose is unclear. Two stones projecting from the outer wall face may have served as temporary scaffolding during construction, or as anchor points for tying down roofing material if the roof was not entirely of stone.

The site sits within a wider landscape on the Dingle Peninsula that is exceptionally dense with early medieval remains, and Caher Murphy is one of the more complete examples of a cashel whose interior structures have survived in legible form. The projecting scaffold stones in particular, small and easy to overlook, offer a rare glimpse into the practical mechanics of construction at a time when such methods were rarely written down.