It has not fallen completely, which is part of what makes it worth attention. The enclosure at Cahermaclanchy survives as a grass-covered, rubble-strewn outline, its interior diameter running about 25.8 metres northeast to southwest, its wall reduced in places to little more than a low grassy ridge rising less than a metre on the inside. At the north-northeast and southeast, two or three rough courses of a limestone outer wall-face still hold their position, giving some sense of the original construction. Two mounds of rubble sit along the western and northwestern stretches of the perimeter, likely the accumulated debris of sections that gave way long ago.

The enclosure sits on level ground among rough pasture, embedded within what appears to be a much larger and older system of fields, a multiperiod landscape where boundaries from different eras overlap and coexist. Such enclosures in the west of Ireland, sometimes called cahersor cashels depending on local usage, were typically dry-stone ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval families, though their dates and functions varied considerably. This particular site was already partially legible on the Ordnance Survey's 25-inch plan of 1897 and on the six-inch edition revised in 1920, meaning it was recognisable as a feature in the landscape even then, though already in a degraded state. The karstic limestone terrain of the Burren and its fringes, where the bedrock is fractured and thin-soiled, creates both the raw material for such walls and the conditions that make them difficult to maintain indefinitely.