A cashel is a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and this one is subrectangular in plan, measuring 52.3 metres north to south and 40 metres east to west. What makes it particularly curious is the layering of time visible within and around it. A later drystone wall, standing up to three metres high, has been built along the southern perimeter where the original stone has since disappeared, and further drystone walls, considerably lower, have been constructed directly over the eastern and western walls. The northern wall has been partially rebuilt. The place has been in continuous use and reuse for long enough that disentangling the original fabric from later intervention is no straightforward matter.

When the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited in 1901, the southern wall of the cashel was apparently still intact, which means its disappearance is a relatively recent loss in archaeological terms. The site appears on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from both 1842 and 1920, though it was recorded in the 1996 Record of Monuments and Places under the somewhat flat designation of 'Rectangular enclosure'. Inside the cashel, the remains are more legible: at the centre there is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval settlement and possibly used for storage or refuge, and a rectangular structure occupies the north-western corner. The cashel sits within a large multiperiod field system, and it is not alone in its landscape. A second cashel and a related enclosure lie within 230 metres to the north-east, linked to the same field system according to research published by Bowmer in 2019. Two burial cairns lie to the north-east, and a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic monument associated with the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, sits roughly 76 metres to the south-east. The plateau around Noughaval, it turns out, has been organised, inhabited, and marked by the dead across several very different periods of prehistory and early history, and this cashel sits somewhere in the middle of that long sequence.