The site is known as Cahernagat, or Cathair na gCat in Irish, a caher being a stone-walled ringfort of the kind built across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards. What survives above ground is not much to look at: a heavily degraded stone bank, largely buried or dismantled, with a fosse, an outer defensive ditch, averaging about four metres wide. Modern field walls have been built directly over the old enclosure, and dense vegetation covers what remains. The roughly circular interior measures around 21 metres at its widest.

The site has suffered considerably from the practical priorities of the twentieth century. Local knowledge holds that stone was taken from the caher during the 1930s and 1940s for road construction in the area, a fate that befell many such monuments when councils needed building material and ancient walls offered a convenient supply. Then, in 1944, County Council workers digging in the interior unexpectedly broke through into something far older: a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber system used in early medieval Ireland for storage, refuge, or both. This one had three separate chambers, each described at the time as roughly ten feet long, four and a half feet wide, and five feet high. A low crawlway connecting two of the chambers was apparently fitted with a porthole slab, a large stone with a hole cut through it, a feature found in other Irish souterrains and thought to have served as a controlled entry point that could be blocked or defended. The discovery was reported in both the Irish Press and the Cork Examiner in April of that year. No trace of the souterrain is visible at the surface today.