This cashel, a ringfort built from drystone walling rather than the more common earthen bank, sits on a south-facing slope at Ballycotteen, with higher ground rising to the north and a stream running roughly fifty metres to the east. The enclosure is subcircular, measuring about 20.5 metres north to south and 16.75 metres east to west internally, and its defining wall has long since collapsed to a height of just 0.7 metres, now grassed over and gapped by modern interventions at the north and north-north-west.

The site was already being mapped in 1840, when it appeared on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch sheets, and it was recorded again on the 1916 revision. What makes Ballycotteen particularly interesting is the suggestion that what survives may not be a single episode of construction. Along the western side of the enclosure, the existing wall sits on top of an earlier band of collapsed material that includes occasional large horizontal slabs. This hints at a preceding structure, possibly another enclosure, whose remains were either absorbed into or simply buried beneath the later cashel wall. To the north-east, a shallow depression in the ground points to an external fosse, a defensive ditch cut around the outside of the enclosure, though this feature appears nowhere else along the perimeter. Ringforts of this type are generally associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, typically dating between the sixth and tenth centuries, and were used as enclosed farmsteads rather than purely military fortifications.