The enclosure at Cahermacnaghten measures roughly 74 metres northwest to southeast and around 70 metres east to west, its boundary formed not by a standing wall but by a low mound wall, the kind of earthen or rubble bank that marks out the ghost of a former boundary rather than an imposing physical barrier. It is the sort of feature that aerial photography reveals far more clearly than a walk across the ground, and it was indeed through satellite and orthographic imagery that its extent was confirmed.

The site sits within a large multiperiod field system, meaning the surrounding landscape carries the overlapping traces of many different phases of human activity, none of them fully erasing what came before. The enclosure itself shows signs of this layering. A wall that appears to be broadly contemporary with the main enclosure curves away to the northeast at its northern edge, suggesting an associated feature or annexe. At the western perimeter, a later stone-walled enclosure has been built directly over the earlier boundary, a common enough occurrence in a region where good building stone is abundant and land has been in continuous use for millennia. A cashel, which is a stone-walled ringfort, lies around 200 metres to the southeast, and another enclosure sits roughly 90 metres to the northeast, placing this feature within a cluster of related but distinct monuments on the same stretch of karst ground. Whether these sites were in use simultaneously or represent successive periods of occupation is not yet clear, but their proximity suggests this particular corner of the Burren was, at various points, a place of some local significance.