What looks at first like a tumbled boundary wall or an irregular rise in the pasture is, on closer inspection, the remains of a cashel, a type of ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks. The enclosure at Ballyhenna sits on a gentle south-facing slope among the undulating pastureland and bare karst limestone outcrops that characterise this part of Clare, its roughly oval shape measuring just over forty-three metres from north-northeast to south-southwest, and just under thirty-two metres across.

The wall defining the enclosure is wide, between five and seven metres combined with its associated tumble, though it now stands only modestly above ground level, reaching somewhere between half a metre on the interior and up to one and a half metres on the exterior face. It was already old enough to be recorded when the Ordnance Survey mapped it for its 1842 six-inch edition, and the centuries since have not been kind to its integrity. A later drystone wall, the kind of practical field boundary that farmers have been adding to ancient structures across Ireland for generations, was at some point built directly on top of the original wall, blurring the distinction between monument and working landscape. Inside the enclosure, additional field walls cross the interior, and careful examination reveals barely traceable collapsed walls suggesting the space was once subdivided, perhaps into separate domestic or agricultural areas. One internal wall, running roughly northwest to southeast, extends for about thirty metres across the middle of the enclosure, with further walls branching from it. A short distance to the north-northeast, around thirty-six and a half metres away, lies a hut site associated with the same complex, a small separate structure that hints at the fuller shape of life once organised around this place.