Researchers now believe it to be a straightforward cartographic error. What the map was most likely pointing towards was a different castle entirely, located a short distance to the south in Ballymahony townland. The label stuck nonetheless, lending a slightly misleading air of feudal grandeur to something rather more interesting: the remains of a cluster of domestic buildings inside one of the Burren's most significant early stone enclosures.

Cahermacnaghten is a cashel, a type of dry-stone ringfort enclosed by a substantial circular wall, and within its interior lie the foundations of five houses. The largest, in the southern portion of the enclosure, measures roughly 8.8 metres by 6.5 metres externally, with walls between 0.95 and 1.1 metres thick. A gap in the northern wall footings marks where its entrance once stood. A smaller structure abuts its western gable and leans against the cashel wall itself, while two further houses occupy the northern interior and a fifth sits closest to the cashel's main entrance. Notably, all five are arranged around the perimeter, leaving the central space open. A deed from 1606 records that these houses had been the property of the grandfather of Aodh and Cosnamhach Ó Dabhoireann, and by the early seventeenth century the two men had divided the cashel's contents between them. The document gives a rare and specific glimpse into how such an ancient enclosure was still being used, inherited, and partitioned as a functioning domestic complex well into the early modern period. Cahermacnaghten is a National Monument in state care.