Two courses of stone, reaching a metre in height and nearly two metres wide, trace an arc visible from the east, south, and west, enclosing a circular area some thirty-one metres in diameter. This is a cashel, the stone equivalent of the more common earthen ringfort, built at a time when farming families ringed their homes and livestock with whatever material the local ground offered. In Carlow, that material was granite.

Ringforts, whether built from earth or stone, were the dominant settlement type in Ireland roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The stone versions, known as cashels, are typically found in areas where rock lies close to the surface and timber or earth banking would have been impractical. The townland here is itself called Cashel, a name derived directly from the Irish word for such a stone enclosure, which suggests this structure was prominent enough to define the place long after anyone last lived within its walls. The surviving bank is partial, visible only across the eastern to western arc, but what remains is substantial enough to convey the original scale of the enclosure.