What remains is a raised platform of ground, roughly 35 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south, ringed by a wall of drystone masonry so worn down by time that it barely clears ankle height in places. No ditch survives around it, and no original entrance can be made out. It is the kind of place whose significance lies almost entirely in what it once was rather than what it now shows.

This is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by its use of stone rather than earthen banks. Ringforts were enclosed farmsteads built predominantly during the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, serving as protected homesteads for farming families of some local standing. The cashel at Gaigue was already ancient when it was recorded as a circular enclosure on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the first systematic cartographic surveys of Ireland, which captured many such features before agricultural clearance or development could erase them. The wall, where it still stands, runs between three and three and a half metres wide, suggesting it was once a substantial boundary, even if it never reached the impressive heights seen at better-preserved cashels elsewhere in the country. The absence of a fosse, the defensive ditch that typically surrounds earthen ringforts, is consistent with the stone-built tradition, where the wall itself provided the enclosure without the need for an accompanying earthwork.