A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, the Irish equivalent of the earthen ráth found more commonly in other parts of the country, and this one at Faunarooska has been reduced to little more than a rubble spread, its wall standing just 0.6 to 0.8 metres high and stretching two to two and a half metres wide. External facing-stones survive around the full circumference, giving the structure its shape, but almost none of the inner facing-stones remain, suggesting the dressed stone was quarried away for use elsewhere over a long period. Only at the north-west does a short stretch hint at the original wall thickness, measuring about 1.2 metres through. The subcircular plan runs roughly 23.8 metres on its north-east to south-west axis and 20.3 metres across, dimensions consistent with a modest but functional enclosed settlement. A separate drystone wall, a metre wide and a metre tall, cuts across the north-west sector, its purpose and period not straightforwardly legible from what survives.

What makes the site more than just a fragmentary structure is its context. The cashel sits on a shelf of a west-facing slope with open views to the west, positioned within a multiperiod field system that covers approximately eight square kilometres of the Slieve Elva landscape. Field systems of this kind accumulated over generations, sometimes millennia, as farming communities enclosed, subdivided, and reorganised the land around them, and the one here represents an unusually extensive palimpsest of that activity. A second cashel lies roughly 90 metres to the north-north-east, also embedded within the same system, suggesting that at some point this corner of Clare supported at least two enclosed settlements in relatively close proximity, perhaps occupied simultaneously, perhaps not. The relationship between the two structures and the surrounding field boundaries remains an open question, the kind that can only be answered by the landscape read as a whole rather than any single monument within it.