The ringfort at Caherelly East is a rath, the most common type of early Irish settlement, in which a family or small community enclosed their dwelling space within a circular earthen bank and ditch. Thousands survive across Ireland, but most people walk past them without a second thought, reading them as nothing more than a gentle rise in a field.

The earthen bank here defines a roughly circular area measuring approximately 19.5 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west. The bank itself is substantial in places, reaching an external height of 1.9 metres, though elsewhere it has been reduced almost to a scarp, meaning the outer face has slumped to little more than a sloping edge in the ground. Around it runs an external fosse, the ditched element of the enclosure, around 3.65 metres wide at its base. A possible entrance survives at the east-south-east, where the bank widens to accommodate a gap some five metres across at its base. The fosse, the bank, and that entrance gap together give a clear sense of how the enclosure would once have functioned as a defensible, or at least well-defined, domestic boundary. The site was recorded by Denis Power and uploaded to the national record in November 2013.

The ringfort sits in rough, level pasture with a coniferous plantation to the north, which means the field conditions can be damp underfoot depending on the season, and the plantation edge provides a useful visual reference when trying to locate the feature. The earthworks are subtle enough that approaching from a distance without some foreknowledge, or without consulting the relevant Sites and Monuments Record entry for County Limerick, could mean missing the site entirely. The most informative vantage point is likely from within the enclosure itself, where the low internal height of the bank, only around half a metre, makes the surrounding earthwork visible as a complete ring, and the outline of the fosse beyond it can be traced with some patience.