A cashel is a ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, and they are generally associated with early medieval settlement and land use in Ireland. What makes this particular cluster remarkable is not what survives but what does not: one of the three has been entirely consumed by quarrying, leaving a void where a monument once stood.

The trio of forts at Ballinard sat at an elevation of roughly 113 metres above sea level, aligned along the crest of the ridge in unusually close proximity to one another. When the Ordnance Survey first mapped the area in the 1840s, all three were still present, recorded on the six-inch edition of that survey. By the time the archaeologist O'Kelly wrote about them in 1942 to 1943, the most easterly of the three had already vanished. The cause, as O'Kelly noted, was quarrying operations that had removed the monument entirely. Later aerial photography, including images taken in January 2003 for the Archaeological Survey of Ireland, confirmed that nothing remained at that location beyond the quarry itself.

The two surviving forts remain visible on the ridge, and the site is best approached with reference to the 1840 Ordnance Survey mapping, which shows the original layout. The quarried area offers a stark contrast, a raw absence where a structure once formed part of an aligned grouping that would have been quite unusual in the Irish archaeological landscape. Visiting in winter or early spring, when vegetation is low, gives the clearest sense of the topography and the relationship between the surviving forts and the point where the third once stood.