What makes this caher, or cashel, a stone-walled enclosure of early medieval origin used to protect a farmstead or dwelling, quietly odd is that the interior sits noticeably lower than the surrounding ground. A rock-cut shelf, three metres wide and standing to about 1.6 metres, runs along the inside from north-east to south, merging into the wall at either end. The wall itself survives only to between 0.4 and 0.8 metres in height, largely grassed over, so the overall impression is less of a fortified enclosure and more of a shallow bowl rimmed by the faint suggestion of a boundary.

The caher sits just below another cashel, which lies roughly 16 metres to the east, and it is not alone in the landscape by any measure. Four cashels cluster within 125 metres of one another here, the furthest pair sitting to the north-north-east. Together they occupy a section of a much larger multiperiod field system covering approximately 8 square kilometres, with grassed-over field walls extending from the north and west of the enclosure. The sheer density of remains in this part of Slieve Elva suggests a landscape that was intensively organised and settled over a long span of time, with different phases of activity layering on top of one another across the hillside. The caher at Ballyelly, with its unusual hollow interior and its incorporated rock shelf, is one relatively small piece of that accumulated pattern.