A cashel is a type of early Irish stone-walled enclosure, typically circular, and the one here at Carnaun still retains enough presence to give context to what lies within it. The house itself is modest in scale, roughly seven metres east to west and just under four metres north to south, and its existence is now legible only as low, grassed-over foundation lines, the walls reduced to a width of about eighty centimetres and a height of thirty centimetres. Along the western side, inner wall-facing stone is still visible, a trace of the original construction technique beneath centuries of accumulated turf.

What makes this site quietly layered is the way different periods of use have accumulated on top of one another. The house predates, or at least exists independently of, a children's burial ground that was later established nearby, part of the same cashel complex, and which has crept over the north-east corner of the house site. Children's burial grounds of this kind, known in Irish tradition as cillíní, were typically used for unbaptised infants who could not be interred in consecrated ground, and they were often placed at the edges of older, already-liminal sites. A low stony bank also runs off the north-west corner of the house, butting up against the inner wall-face of the cashel, suggesting some deliberate organisation of space within the enclosure, though the date of the house itself remains unresolved. The reference to Cody's 1989 survey provides the primary documentation for the site, but the structure's precise period of occupation has not been pinned down.