These are cashels, a term for a ringfort built from drystone rather than earthen banks, and at Cahernaheeny they represent a particularly quiet kind of survival, one in which centuries of farming have done their best to erase what earlier centuries built.

The smaller of the two cashels, measuring roughly 27 metres in diameter and positioned to the northwest, has been cut through by a field wall running from north-northwest to south-southeast, effectively splitting it. Where its original drystone walling survives to the southwest of that boundary, it has been obscured by field-clearance rubble, the accumulated debris of generations of farmers lifting stones from the surrounding land and depositing them along convenient edges. Elsewhere, no surface trace remains at all, though two set stones are still visible within the southern half of the interior, possibly the last legible remnants of internal features. The larger cashel to the southeast, 36 metres across, fares no better; its drystone circuit has been entirely overlain by a later field wall, rendering the original boundary almost invisible unless you know what to look for. Immediately to the west-southwest lies a separate earthwork, suggesting this area of ridge was, at some point, a more complex and active landscape than the empty grassland it now appears.