The cashel, a type of early medieval stone ringfort with a roughly circular or oval drystone wall, was recorded on Ordnance Survey maps as early as 1838 under the name Cahervilla. By 1919 it had already begun to lose detail; internal subdivisions and a rectangular building visible at the north-east edge of the enclosure in the earlier survey had disappeared from the later edition entirely. Today the cashel itself has been levelled, and a roadway bordered by a drystone wall now skirts what was once its western side.

What makes this site more than a footnote in the long story of vanished ringforts is its scale and a single standing stone. The enclosure measured roughly 65 metres on its north-west to south-east axis and about 50 metres across, which is notably large for a cashel of this kind. A cross-slab, a flat stone bearing an incised or relief cross and a characteristic form of early Christian marker in Ireland, still stands in the northern half of the old enclosure. Its position may not be original, having likely been moved at some point, but its presence alongside the unusual size of the enclosure has led some researchers to consider whether this was not a secular farmstead at all, but an ecclesiastical site. Early monastic and church enclosures in Ireland were often defined by a roughly circular boundary, sometimes of stone, and when that boundary is as large as the one recorded here, the possibility of a religious foundation rather than a domestic one becomes harder to dismiss.