The site is known as Caher Murphy, or Cathair Mhurfaí in Irish, and what makes it quietly arresting is not any one feature but the accumulation of them: five roughly circular clocháns, the beehive-shaped stone huts associated with early Irish monastic and secular settlement, pressed together inside an oval cashel, which is a dry-stone ringfort wall. Beneath one of those huts, a souterrain, an underground passage built from stone and used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation, runs through to a chamber set beneath the cashel wall itself.

Restoration work carried out in the nineteenth century by the Office of Public Works brought the site back from considerable ruin, and during that process an elaborate cross-slab came to light. Carved stone slabs of this kind are among the more expressive survivals of early Christian Ireland, and this one was considered significant enough to be removed to the National Museum of Ireland, where it remains. A fragment of the upper stone of a rotary quern was also found loose within the cashel. Rotary querns are hand-operated grinding stones used to process grain, and their presence at a site suggests domestic or agricultural activity rather than purely ceremonial use. The western end of the interior courtyard was walled off at some point to create a sixth, irregularly shaped unroofed structure, its paved entrance just over a metre long and less than half a metre wide, opening southward onto the shared courtyard space.

The site sits within the extraordinarily dense archaeological landscape of the Dingle Peninsula, an area that has yielded an exceptional concentration of early medieval remains. The cashel's position on the slopes of Mount Eagle gives the whole complex a particular quality of exposure; the bay below is wide and the horizon unobstructed, which perhaps says something about why people chose this elevation in the first place.