This is a ditch barrow, a type of funerary monument in which the defining feature is not a mound raised above the surface but a circular fosse, or ditch, cut into the earth, with the interior left at roughly the same level as the surrounding land. The effect is almost the inverse of what most people imagine when they picture a prehistoric burial site, which makes these monuments easy to overlook and, in some ways, all the more intriguing for it.

The Shronell example is modest in scale but precise in what survives. The circular area it encloses measures roughly 7.25 metres north to south and 6.75 metres east to west, defined by a fosse approximately 1.7 metres wide and 0.15 metres deep. The ditch retains water along its south-south-west to west-north-west arc, which may help account for its continued visibility in otherwise well-managed agricultural land. The interior slopes gently towards the south-west but sits at the same height as the ground outside the fosse, reinforcing the sense that this monument was always defined by subtraction rather than addition. A low linear scarp runs east to west about 1.75 metres to the north, and a more gradual one lies roughly 11 metres to the south; whether these are natural features of the undulating terrain or remnants of some earlier human activity remains unclear. A separate enclosure sits just 3.5 metres to the west, suggesting this small corner of Tipperary was used and shaped over a long period, though the precise relationship between the two monuments is not recorded.