The structure is roughly 26 metres in diameter, and while that is not a modest footprint, very little of it now reads as a wall. What remains is largely a collapsed scatter of stone, low enough that a passing walker might take it for a natural feature of the land.

Cashels were typically built during the early medieval period in Ireland, between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, and functioned as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. The drystone construction, fitted without mortar, was practical in areas where stone was plentiful and timber scarce, as is often the case across much of Connacht. This particular example sits immediately east of an associated field system, suggesting it was once part of a working agricultural landscape, the enclosure and the fields around it forming a coherent unit of settlement and land use. The name Caherakeeny itself contains the Irish word cathair, meaning a stone fort, which points to local memory of the site persisting long after the structure itself fell into ruin.