A cashel is a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, typically enclosing a farmstead or homestead in early medieval Ireland, and they vary considerably in size. This one, at roughly twenty metres in diameter according to the Ordnance Survey maps of 1846 and 1894 to 1895, sits at the modest end of the scale. It occupies a quietly commanding position, with the valley of the Owgarriff River opening to the west and the Finow River running eastward toward Lough Guitane, yet the monument itself offers no visual drama whatsoever at ground level.

The most vivid account of it comes from the 1930s, when Captain D. D. O'Connell examined the site and noted it down as a tiny stone-walled circular rath, adding, with the air of someone who had seen a great many such things, that it was one of the smallest he had encountered. His estimate of the diameter, around twenty feet or six metres, suggests the structure had contracted somewhat from what the earlier maps recorded, or perhaps he was measuring only the visible core of the walling. Either way, the description captures something genuinely unusual: a monument that has persisted in the landscape for well over a millennium and yet occupies less floor space than a modest modern kitchen.