Ordnance Survey maps from 1840 hachured it as a feature worth noting, but by the 1916 edition it had acquired the name Cahermacon. Before that, John O'Donovan recorded it in 1839 under the townland name Cahermochunna, describing it as a caher, the Irish term for a stone-walled enclosure, and noting a local tradition that it had once been the residence of the O'Hehir family. By 1900, the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp had logged it as Cahermachuna and was considerably less impressed, dismissing it as "mere foundations" of "small dimensions." More recently it was catalogued as a cashel, a closely related type of stone enclosure. The site now sits in the official record as a rath, which is typically an earthen rather than stone-built enclosure. The accumulated names and shifting classifications are themselves a small history of how Irish field monuments were observed, debated, and sometimes misread over successive generations.

What remains on the ground bears out Westropp's lukewarm assessment, though there is more here than a casual glance suggests. The enclosure is subrectangular in plan, measuring roughly 24.4 metres east to west and about 18 metres north to south. Its boundary is a slightly curving, flat-topped bank that runs from the south-east around through west to north, and where it is best preserved at the southern side, the bank is still 6.5 metres wide and rises about 1.2 metres on the exterior face, with occasional facing-stones still visible. Spoil piled onto the bank from later agricultural activity has altered its profile on the south-west to north arc, and a double-faced drystone townland boundary wall, built to separate landholdings rather than to enclose a settlement, now overlies the enclosing element on the northern and south-eastern sides. Inside, a scattering of clearance cairns, small heaps of stone gathered from the ground during farming, sit in the interior. Approximately 130 metres to the west-north-west lies a second cashel, making this a part of a quietly dense early medieval landscape on this east-west valley ridge.