What it once enclosed was a cashel, a type of ringfort built from dry stone rather than earthen banks, and the circular form it describes, roughly twenty-six metres across from north to south, is still legible beneath the collapsed masonry. At its widest the wall measures about a metre across and still stands to around one and a half metres in places, which is a reasonable survival for a structure that has had no formal protection from the encroaching woodland.

Cashels of this kind were typically the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, occupied broadly between the sixth and twelfth centuries, though many were built earlier or continued in use later. They housed a family and its livestock within a defended perimeter, and the small hut site recorded here, measuring just three metres by two, pressed against the inner face of the western wall, is a trace of that domestic life. The interior surface is uneven, broken by rock outcrops and patches of clearance, the kind of ground that resists cultivation and so tends to preserve what was built on it. Most strikingly, the northern section of the cashel wall has been absorbed into a modern field boundary, a very common fate for ancient stonework in the Irish countryside, where generations of farmers found it practical to extend or repair their own walls using whatever was already standing.