That collision of two different eras of land management, one prehistoric, one associated with later estate enclosure, is what gives the site at Shortallstown its quietly layered quality. The rath, which is the Irish term for an earthen ringfort of the kind built primarily during the early medieval period as a farmstead enclosure, sits in level pasture now overgrown with trees, bushes, briars, and scrub in the interior.

The enclosure is roughly circular, measuring around 70 metres in overall diameter. It is defined by an earthen bank and an outer fosse, the term for a defensive or boundary ditch. Where the bank survives best, along the southern arc from south-east through south to south-west, it still stands about two metres high on the exterior face, though the interior height has been reduced to just 0.15 metres. The outer fosse runs three metres wide and reaches 1.5 metres in depth, and in the eastern quadrant it was recorded as waterlogged as far back as May 1957, when the Office of Public Works corresponded on the site. Along the western side, the original bank has been replaced entirely by a straight, narrow field ditch, a fairly common fate for earthworks that stood in the way of later agricultural tidying. A gap of around 2.4 metres in the bank on the south-east side likely marks the original entrance. Approximately 40 metres to the north-west lies a second enclosure, and the proximity of the two raises the possibility that this landscape was more intensively settled than its current pastoral appearance suggests.