A cashel is a stone-built ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that was common across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically used as a defended homestead for a farming family of some status. This particular example, near Crumlin, once commanded wide views stretching from the southwest across to the north-northwest, with Galway Bay visible in the distance and higher ground rising away to the east and southeast. It is the kind of elevated position that would have made good practical sense to an early farmer, even if the monument itself has since been reduced to little more than a low bank.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1901, described the site as almost completely destroyed, and the evidence on the ground bears that out. The nearly circular enclosure measures roughly 22.7 metres east to west and 20.6 metres north to south internally, defined by a bank of earth and stone that varies considerably in condition. It stands anywhere between 0.3 and 1.2 metres high on the exterior, and is at its most degraded along the east, northeast, and northwest arcs. Facing stones from the outer wall survive only along the southern and western stretches, reaching a maximum height of about half a metre. A later field wall cuts straight through the western interior, and a narrow sheepfold recorded on nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey mapping was built directly against the monument's outer edge at the northeast. The cashel appears on the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1842 and is partially hachured on the later Cassini edition of 1915, placing it within a documented, if slow-moving, process of agricultural absorption that had clearly been under way for centuries before Westropp arrived to take notes.