This is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a drystone wall rather than an earthen rampart, and the one at Carrowcanada sits on a gentle rise with the ground falling away more steeply to the west. The wall has long since collapsed into a sod-covered stone bank, but it still traces a near-circular area roughly 29 metres north to south and just over 32 metres east to west.

The detail that survives in the fabric of the cashel rewards close attention. At the south and south-west, the bank retains fragments of its original stone facing, both on the interior and exterior faces, laid in the dry-stone manner without mortar. On the steeper western slope, where natural subsidence would have been most pronounced, the bank has slumped considerably outward, and what remains there appears to incorporate field clearance stones gathered at some later point, complicating the original profile. A low section in the bank at the east might suggest an entrance, but there is no clearly defined gap. The souterrain in the southern interior is a particular point of interest: souterrains are dry-stone or rock-cut underground passages associated with early medieval settlements in Ireland, typically interpreted as storage spaces or places of refuge. A fragment of a field wall also crosses the northern half of the interior on a north-east to south-west line, evidence of later agricultural reorganisation cutting across and through the older enclosure. A small area of quarrying, around three metres in diameter, has bitten into the northern face of the bank, a reminder that the cashel's stone was a practical resource for whoever farmed the land afterward. A stand of conifers now occupies the north-west quadrant, and blackthorn has taken hold along the bank at the same corner, slowly reclaiming the margins of the structure.