The 1922 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as a roughly circular earthwork approximately 44 metres in diameter, a substantial feature by any measure. Today, no surface trace survives. The land has absorbed it entirely, leaving behind only the cartographic memory of something that was once clearly defined enough for a surveyor to set down on paper.

Enclosures of this kind were a common feature of the early medieval Irish landscape, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads or settlement sites. Their disappearance from the ground is not unusual; centuries of ploughing, drainage, and grazing can reduce even a substantial earthen bank to nothing. What gives Cahercarney a particular interest is its relationship with a neighbouring site. A cashel, which is a stone-built enclosure of the same general type but constructed in dry-stone rather than earthen banks, lies roughly 60 metres to the south-south-east. The proximity of the two suggests this was once a more densely occupied corner of the landscape than its current agricultural plainness implies.