What survives above ground is modest: the footings of a drystone wall, roughly two and a half metres wide, enclosing a raised circular area about 38 metres in diameter. The internal height barely reaches a quarter of a metre in places. And yet the site commands views that are good to excellent in every direction, a quality that was almost certainly not accidental.

This is a cashel, a type of ringfort enclosed by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank and ditch. Ringforts were the dominant settlement form in early medieval Ireland, broadly spanning the period from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and were typically the enclosed farmsteads of prosperous families. At Moneygold, the enclosing wall was built from rubble limestone, and substantial basal blocks, averaging around a metre in length and nearly half a metre thick, survive along the southern and south-western arc of the circuit, with further external blocks visible to the north and north-east. Unusually, there is no fosse, the defensive ditch that typically rings an earthen ringfort, visible at ground level here. Instead, much of the perimeter is defined by a natural scarp, suggesting the builders made deliberate use of the ridge's topography. The original entrance has not been identified.

A later drystone field wall cuts across the site in a way that speaks to the long afterlife of such enclosures in the Irish countryside. Running roughly north-north-east to south-south-west along the base of the scarped edge, it turns and extends some eight metres into the interior before crossing the cashel wall again to the north-north-east. This kind of reuse is common: once the social and political world that gave ringforts their meaning had dissolved, the walls and banks became convenient boundaries for agricultural land, their original purpose gradually forgotten or folded into local tradition.