A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, the dryland counterpart to the more widely known earthen ráth, and this particular example at Kiltaan occupies the eastern edge of a north-to-south ridge, set among rough pasture and hazel scrub within the ghostly outlines of a much older field system.

The structure itself is subcircular, measuring just under twenty metres east to west and just under seventeen metres north to south, which makes it a modest but coherent enclosure. Its defining feature is a double-faced wall, meaning a wall built with two dressed outer surfaces and a rubble core between them, a construction technique common across early medieval Ireland. That wall is now largely obscured by rubble that has slumped and been banked against both faces, swelling the total width to somewhere between three and four and a half metres in places, though the original wall itself was only around one and a half metres wide. Moss covers what little stonework remains visible. Despite the general deterioration, the entrance is one of the clearest surviving features, a gap of one and a quarter metres facing east, the direction favoured for many ringfort entrances across the country. A later drystone wall has been built directly over the cashel's perimeter, suggesting the site was pressed back into agricultural use at some point after its original purpose lapsed. On the western side, this later wall takes a short detour of around five metres into the cashel interior, a peculiarity whose reason is now lost. The site was already recorded on the Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch plan of 1897 and on the six-inch edition of 1920, though it was catalogued only as an "enclosure" in the Record of Monuments and Places as recently as 1996.

The companion cashel to the south-west adds a layer of interest that neither site alone could offer. Two cashels in such close proximity suggest a settlement of some complexity, perhaps two households or kin-groups sharing a plateau that has since returned to scrub and silence.