Local nomenclature reinforces this: the Ordnance Survey Name Books record it as a calluragh, an Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground, typically used for unbaptised infants or others excluded from formal church burial. But the stones here tell a rather different story. What survives at An Gabhlán Ard appears to be a cashel, a type of early medieval stone-walled enclosure used for settlement and farming, with the burial ground use likely a later, secondary phase. It is an easy misidentification to make; cashels and calluraghs share certain surface features, and once a site acquires a funerary reputation it tends to keep it.

The enclosure measures roughly 21.8 metres north to south and 16 metres east to west internally, giving it an oval rather than a perfectly circular footprint. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey map, produced in the nineteenth century, recorded it as a circular enclosure, but the western side is now incorporated into a modern field wall that curves slightly, possibly following the line of the original cashel wall. Elsewhere around the perimeter, the wall has been reduced to a single course of stone, less than half a metre high and about a metre thick. An entrance facing east-north-east survives at 1.6 metres wide, though its original jamb stones are gone. Inside the enclosure, a cluster of structures crowds near the entrance: a small rectangular feature measuring 3 metres by 1.9 metres, a roughly circular stone outline just 1.8 metres in diameter immediately to its west, and a larger oval depression defined by stones to the south-west, around 3.7 metres by 1.8 metres. A possible fourth structure shows faint traces in the southern sector. These are consistent with the modest hut-sites found within early Irish cashels, where a farming family and their animals would have sheltered within the protective stone circuit. The full picture of the site was set out by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, which remains the foundational account of the archaeology of Corca Dhuibhne.