Rather than occupying the centre of the great Mooghaun hillfort in County Clare, this cashel, a type of ringfort built from drystone walling rather than earthen banks, is tucked against the outer rampart, eccentric in both its location and its relationship to the layers of occupation beneath and around it. A cashel is essentially a circular or subcircular defended enclosure, its walls serving as the boundary of a farmstead or minor stronghold, and this one is a bivallate example, meaning it had two enclosing walls, though it is the inner circuit that survives most clearly.

The cashel forms a roughly subcircular area measuring 34 metres north-east to south-west and 38 metres north-west to south-east, enclosed by a drystone wall approximately two metres wide and still standing to around two metres in height. An original entrance, 2.3 metres wide, faces north-east. Inside, the ground is largely level, save for a raised pad of natural rock near the centre, and a hut site is attached to the interior of the wall on the northern side. Fieldwork carried out in 1994 as part of the Discovery Programme's North Munster Project brought considerable complexity to light. A curving stone bank north of the cashel, first noticed by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp in 1893, turned out to extend a full 90 metres when vegetation was cleared, running through the hillfort rampart and converging on the cashel itself. More significantly, the clearance revealed that the cashel was constructed on a platform that may predate the hillfort, and that an earlier enclosure extends to the south and east of the cashel. The cashel is not centred on this platform, a small but telling detail suggesting the site accumulated meaning and function across several distinct periods, each building on, or quietly ignoring, what came before.