A roughly circular enclosure, nearly twenty-eight metres across at its widest, has been cut into the hillside on its western side and built up on its eastern side, so that the interior sits level despite the slope beneath it. This engineering instinct is one of the quieter pleasures of Irish ringforts, the farmstead enclosures that dot the Irish countryside in their thousands and date predominantly from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Most were the defended homesteads of farming families, enclosed by earthen banks or stone walls to protect livestock and household alike.

At Caherkeen, the enclosure boundary is a mixture of methods. Along the northern to southern arc, a scarp, essentially a steeply cut earth face, rises to around 2.2 metres and is stone-faced in places, giving it something of the character of a cashel, the term used for a ringfort whose enclosure is primarily of dry-stone construction. From the south around to the south-west, a ruined stone wall takes over, and from the south-west around to the north-north-west, a sharp natural or shaped rise of 1.4 metres completes the circuit. Inside this compound, set slightly off-centre towards the north, are the foundations of a circular stone-built hut, measuring roughly 5.6 metres north to south and 6.1 metres east to west. Foundations alone remain, but their outline is clear enough to suggest the domestic scale of whoever once lived here, a single roundhouse within a carefully levelled yard on an unremarkable hillside in West Cork.