A cashel is a ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, and this one, once roughly forty-six metres in diameter, has effectively ceased to exist in any visible sense. Where there was once a substantial circular enclosure, there is now cleared grassland and nothing that the eye can easily read as archaeology.

When Cilian McCaffrey recorded it in 1952, the structure was already in a poor state, described as a very ruinous stone fort with only half of the monument still remaining. That half is now gone too, lost to land clearance at some point after his visit. The site is not unusual in that respect; ringforts of all kinds, which were built in their thousands across Ireland during the early medieval period as enclosed farmsteads for farming families of varying status, have been disappearing from the landscape for centuries, cleared for tillage, quarried for wall-stone, or simply worn away. What makes Coldwood notable is how completely and quietly that process has been completed here.