The cashel itself, a type of ringfort defined by a circular stone wall rather than an earthen bank, sits quietly on a rise in undulating limestone pasture at Carrowneden, its enclosing wall so reduced by time and accumulated field clearance that it is easy to mistake for a natural feature of the land.

At roughly 30 metres across, the roughly circular enclosure is defined by what was once a substantial stone wall, now surviving as a low, sod-covered stony rise no more than half a metre high and topped with loose boulders. Many of those boulders, it seems, are not original construction but material dumped by later farmers clearing their fields, a process that has both preserved and obscured the structure beneath. When inspectors visited in 1984, an outer wall facing of large stones was still visible along the southern arc; by 1998, heaps of clearance debris had buried much of that same section. The interior is uneven, scattered with stones and pocked with hollows, and a modern field boundary cuts straight across it, indifferent to what lies underneath. The most revealing detail is in the south-west quadrant, where a surface collapse has exposed a lintelled opening, the stone-roofed entrance to the souterrain below. Souterrains, built during the early medieval period, were typically used for cool storage or as refuges, their passages cut into the earth and roofed with large flat stones. No clearly defined entrance gap survives in the cashel wall itself, which suggests the original threshold has long since been swallowed by clearance stone and encroaching scrub.