The cashel at Ballyconry, roughly 35 metres across at its widest, is the kind of site that rewards a second look: a later drystone wall, still functioning today as a townland boundary, turns out to rest directly on the rubble and standing sections of an earlier, thicker wall of coursed stone construction. Beneath the interior, the site conceals a souterrain, an artificial underground passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval settlement, which in this case incorporates a natural cave. A cashel, for context, is an Irish stone-walled enclosure broadly equivalent to the more familiar earthen ringfort; both were characteristic settlement forms of the early medieval period.

The monument sits on SE-facing slopes of a rough pasture and limestone pavement landscape, abutting the southern limits of a large prehistoric enclosure and lying within an extensive, multi-period field system that speaks to layer upon layer of land use across the centuries. The site appears on both the 1840 and 1916 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, suggesting it was always visible enough to be noted, even if its full complexity went unappreciated for a long time. When Gibson catalogued it in 2007 as site C-170, the documented presence of the souterrain pointed towards an early medieval date for at least part of the monument, though the underlying prehistoric enclosure it adjoins makes clear that human activity on this ridge predates that period considerably. The clearance cairns visible in the levelled south-eastern sector of the interior are a quieter detail, piles of stone gathered and stacked by farming communities working the same ground over generations.