What survives measures about twenty metres across, the original wall now reduced to a height of roughly forty centimetres, with a later field fence built on top of it, the two periods of enclosure sitting one on the other in a way that quietly complicates the landscape.

This is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by its use of stone rather than earthen banks, most commonly found in the west and south of Ireland and generally associated with early medieval settlement, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. On the western to eastern arc there is a possible outer wall, standing about thirty centimetres high, with a shallow fosse between the two circuits. A fosse is simply a ditch, here presumably cut to reinforce the enclosure against the slope. The interior itself has been levelled slightly on its northern side to compensate for the natural downhill gradient, a small but deliberate act of construction that speaks to how carefully even a modest site was prepared for habitation or use. The name Caherdowney contains the element "caher", an Anglicisation of the Irish "cathair", which itself refers to a stone fort, so the place has been identified with this kind of structure for long enough that the association is embedded in the townland name.