A cashel is a stone-walled enclosure, typically circular, used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or place of refuge. This one is unusual not just for its complexity, with conjoined huts and hidden passages arranged within the enclosing wall, but for how thoroughly the record of it shifts depending on who was looking and when.

When George Victor Du Noyer examined the site in 1858, he found a cashel roughly 75 feet in diameter, its outer wall some 8 feet thick and slightly battered, meaning it tapered inward from base to top, apparently finishing in a parapet. Inside, he recorded three conjoined circular huts. The easternmost, about 17 feet across internally, had its entrance facing south-east, and a narrow passage just south of that entrance led to a very small circular room. A second passage to the west connected to a third hut, around 16 feet in diameter. By the time R. A. S. Macalister revisited the site in 1899, the picture had changed considerably. He accepted Du Noyer's account of the enclosing wall but dismissed the interior description as bearing little resemblance to what he found. Macalister recorded an enclosure somewhat larger, between 80 and 105 feet in diameter, containing around ten heaps of stone, some possibly the collapsed remains of clochauns, which are the dry-stone corbelled huts associated with early Christian and earlier settlement in this part of Kerry. He also found the foundations of a pair of conjoined huts and a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber often used for storage or refuge, entered from the east, with a smaller chamber adjoining to the north-east. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey map had shown three huts inside a circular enclosure; the second edition, published in 1895, marked seven circular structures within a form that had shifted to roughly oval. Whether the site was actively collapsing across those decades, whether earlier visitors disturbed it, or whether the two men were simply looking at different portions of a complex and degraded site, the record offers no firm answer.