Two possible souterrains, underground stone-lined tunnels typically used for storage or refuge in early medieval Ireland, have been identified at this site: one apparently running beneath the north-eastern bank, a second lying just outside it. That detail alone sets the fort at Caherbaroul apart from the plainer examples that dot the Irish countryside, and it raises the kind of questions that tend to linger.

The fort itself is a substantial thing. Its roughly circular interior measures approximately 43 metres in diameter, defined by an earthen bank that still stands around 1.8 metres high on the interior face. Beyond that bank sits a deep, flat-bottomed fosse, the term for a defensive ditch, and beyond the fosse a counterscarp bank reaching about a metre in height. Parts of the main bank retain stone facing, and a causewayed gap to the north-west would once have served as the formal entrance. The interior is not flat; it slopes down to the south-east, and the south-eastern half is occupied by a shallow, saucer-shaped depression, with the faint corrugations of old cultivation ridges still legible across the ground. Later generations made practical use of what the fort-builders left behind, replacing the top of the bank with a field fence that continues around much of the circuit. The fosse has been almost completely filled in along the south-east to south arc, and the counterscarp bank is disturbed in the same stretch. What makes the wider setting particularly interesting is that the fort sits within the south-eastern quadrant of what may be an early ecclesiastical enclosure, a larger curvilinear boundary that could suggest an early Christian monastic or church site once occupied this ground, with the ringfort either predating it or forming part of the same complex of activity.