The 1838 edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map clearly marks a rectangular structure in the south-west quadrant of this ancient enclosure, yet no visible trace of it survives on the ground today. That quiet disappearance is part of what makes this site worth pausing over: a place where the historical record and the physical landscape have quietly diverged.

The enclosure itself is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a drystone wall rather than an earthen bank. Roughly circular and approximately 35 metres in diameter, its perimeter wall is now grassed over but still largely legible. The interior is more complex than a first glance suggests, subdivided by a series of banks and low walls, with traces of possible house sites scattered within. In the northern sector, there is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval settlement and used for storage or, in some interpretations, refuge. A small rectangular house site sits just outside the enclosing wall to the east, roughly three metres clear of it, suggesting activity that extended beyond the main enclosure. To the south, a silage pit has been cut into the wall, a reminder that working farmland and ancient monuments often occupy the same ground in rural Ireland. A separate rath, a ringfort defined by earthen rather than stone construction, lies around 140 metres to the south-west, hinting that this part of Carrowbaun was once a more densely settled early medieval landscape than its present woodland setting implies.