What was once a cashel, a type of ringfort built from drystone walling rather than earthen banks, now survives as little more than a grass-covered ridge tracing an oval roughly 56 metres north to south and 47.5 metres east to west. On the northern and eastern sides even that much has gone, replaced by a natural scarp in the ground that the original builders may have incorporated into their defences, or that the centuries have simply left behind as the stonework collapsed and vanished.

Cashels like this one were a common feature of early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family or small community. Their drystone walls, built without mortar, were susceptible to robbing and gradual collapse, which is why so many survive only as faint traces. At Garraunard, a further drystone wall running northeast to southwest through the centre of the interior may represent an internal division of the enclosed space, perhaps separating a domestic area from one used for livestock or storage. It is a tentative reading; the feature survives poorly enough that its original purpose is difficult to confirm. A cattle shed now stands to the northeast, and field walls cut across the monument at both its northern and southern ends, the ordinary infrastructure of working farmland quietly overwriting an older arrangement that predates it by perhaps a thousand years or more.