Most people use the word ringfort loosely, picturing a single grassy bank around a flat interior, but this one was built with considerably more care and anxiety about defence: an inner drystone wall, then a flat berm, then an earthen bank, then a fosse (a defensive ditch), then another berm, and finally a second, outer drystone wall beyond all of that. The overall footprint is roughly 40 metres east to west and 35.5 metres north to south, not enormous, but the concentric effort that went into enclosing it suggests the people who built it were serious about controlling who and what came in.

A cashel is essentially a stone-walled ringfort, the dryland counterpart to the earthen raths that dot the Irish countryside, and most date to the early medieval period, broadly the sixth to twelfth centuries. This one survives in fair condition, though a later field wall has cut through the outer enclosure on the western side, and the south-east and south-west sections have suffered some damage. A gap on the south-east may be modern in origin, but it could also trace the line of the original entrance. Inside, in the south-western sector, there is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind commonly associated with storage and, in times of trouble, concealment. A short distance to the north-east of the cashel proper, around five metres away, a separate small circular earthwork about nine metres in diameter sits in the grass. It has traces of an internal subdivision, suggesting it may once have been a house, an outbuilding or ancillary structure standing just beyond the main enclosure wall.