It is a cashel, which is the term used for a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, and this one is defined entirely by a drystone wall, fitted together without mortar in the tradition of vernacular stone construction found throughout the west of Ireland. Measuring approximately 22 metres east to west and 18.3 metres north to south, it is a modest but coherent structure, and its condition is described as fair, meaning the wall survives well enough to read the original form of the enclosure, even if time and grazing livestock have taken their toll at the edges.

Ringforts of this kind were typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and served as enclosed farmsteads for families of some local standing. The cashel form was particularly common in areas where stone was more readily available than good timber or deep earthen soils, which describes much of Connacht aptly. The site at Carheennascovoge was noted by a succession of researchers over several decades, appearing in the work of Redington in 1916, Westropp in 1919, and McCaffrey in 1952, which gives some sense of how long it has sat quietly in the scholarly record, acknowledged but seldom discussed at length. Thomas Johnson Westropp, who documented Westropp in 1919, was a particularly prolific recorder of Irish field monuments and his inclusion of this cashel places it within a wider catalogue of sites he surveyed across Munster and Connacht during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.