A cashel is a dry-stone ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement common in early medieval Ireland, and this one measures roughly 22 by 17 metres internally. What makes it unusual is that its interior is almost entirely consumed by a cluster of six conjoined clochauns, the beehive-shaped corbelled stone huts associated with early Christian monastic and secular life on the Dingle Peninsula. They are packed together tightly, sharing walls and opening into one another through low paved passages, and one of them connects to an L-shaped souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage and chamber that runs beneath the cashel wall itself, complete with air vents and a wedge-shaped side chamber roofed by a single corbelled slab.

Restoration work carried out by the Office of Public Works in the nineteenth century disturbed something remarkable: an elaborately decorated cross-slab, which had apparently been reused as a jamb stone in the entrance to one of the huts. The slab, now held at the National Museum of Ireland, is carved on all four faces. One broad face shows a Maltese cross in false relief, flanked by saltire crosslets and, beneath the cross stem, a small tunic-clad human figure with upstanding hair, possibly a halo, and arms bent at the elbows. The opposite face carries a Greek cross with expanded terminals and a triple figure-of-eight knotwork panel below it. One narrow side bears a worn interlace design; the other carries an ogham inscription, ogham being an early medieval script in which letters are represented by notches and lines cut along a stem, though this particular inscription has resisted confident reading, with scholars including Macalister in 1945 and Rhys in 1902 disagreeing over individual scores. The sequence, read from bottom to top, has been tentatively rendered as LBMCBDV. Alongside the cross-slab, a fragment of a rotary quern stone was also found loose within the enclosure, a small trace of the everyday grinding work that once went on inside these walls.