This is a cashel, a type of ringfort enclosed by a dry-stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and this particular one has been quietly losing its shape for a very long time. What remains is a spread of stone four to five metres wide and rarely more than a metre high internally, with a few outer facing-stones still holding their position to the north, east, and south-west. The site commands open views in a broad arc from south to north, though a slight rise in the ground about 50 metres to the east means it was never entirely dominant in its landscape.

The cashel appears on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from both 1842 and 1915, marked in the cartographic shorthand of hachuring that signals an earthwork or enclosure, so its outline has been a recognised feature of this corner of Clare for at least 180 years. In 1977, a researcher named Robinson recorded the presence of a souterrain within the cashel; souterrains are dry-stone underground passages associated with early medieval settlements, typically used for storage or refuge. When the site was examined again in 1997, no souterrain could be confirmed. What Robinson may have seen was exposed stone pavement in the west-north-west sector of the interior, which could plausibly have been mistaken for the roof slabs of a passage. The question remains open. A later field wall, almost certainly post-medieval in origin, has been built directly onto the cashel fabric, running from the north-north-east around to the east and again from the south to the south-west, which has further blurred the original outline.

The site does not sit in isolation. Another cashel lies roughly 60 metres to the north, and two further enclosures are visible within about 180 metres to the north-east and east-south-east respectively. Some of the field walls threading between these monuments may themselves be ancient, part of a landscape that has been divided and worked over many centuries without ever quite erasing what was there before.