The enclosure measures twenty-nine metres across in both directions, its boundary a low, broad-based bank of stone reaching roughly ninety centimetres in height, now heavily overgrown. A second fence runs along the top of the bank itself on the northern and eastern sides, as though the structure has simply been absorbed into the working geometry of the farm.

This is a cashel, the Irish term for a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks and ditches. Ringforts were the dominant settlement form in early medieval Ireland, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries, functioning as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. The cashel form was particularly common in areas of the country where stone lay closer to the surface than workable soil, and West Cork produced many of them. The one at Cooranig sits on a north-west-facing slope, which is not the most favoured aspect for habitation but is by no means unusual. What survives is the enclosing bank alone; whatever timber structures once stood inside are long gone, and the interior is now ordinary grazing land, divided in two by a field fence that pays no attention to the older boundary beneath and around it.