What makes this cashel, a type of ringfort constructed from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, more than a simple enclosure is the density of what survives inside it. The roughly circular interior, measuring just over thirty metres at its widest, once contained at least four separate structures pressed against the inner face of the surrounding wall.

Ringforts of this kind were the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, built and occupied broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and typically home to a single farming family and their livestock. The cashel at Maughanaclea follows that general pattern but retains more internal complexity than many comparable sites. The lower courses of two semicircular structures survive in the north-eastern quadrant, one measuring roughly three and a half metres by two and a half, the other slightly larger. A more substantial rectangular structure, some thirteen metres long and three and a half metres wide, is built against the south-eastern wall. Traces of a fourth building survive in the south-western quadrant. The wall itself, where it stands, is nearly two and a half metres thick. Beneath the uneven interior surface there is also a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the sort commonly found within Irish ringforts, which may have served for storage or as a place of concealment during times of threat.

The site sits in open pasture and is most legible in low winter light, when shadows sharpen the outlines of collapsed walling and the slight rise of the hillock becomes more apparent from the surrounding fields. The interior stonework, though fragmentary, rewards a slow circuit of the enclosure.