Within a radius of fewer than a hundred metres, there is a ringfort, the site of a seventeenth-century military camp, and, a little further off to the north-west, Shinglis Castle. The enclosure itself, quietly annotated as a "fort" on the 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map, has never carried a definitive function. It has no visible entrance feature, which is itself a puzzle, and its slight earth and stone bank, broken by several small gaps, encloses an interior that tilts gently westward and dips toward both its northern and southern ends.

The way this site has been described across time tells a small story of its own. The 1837 OS six-inch map records it as an oval earthwork, and by the revised 1913 edition of the twenty-five-inch map it appears as an oblong shape, roughly thirty metres north to south and seventeen metres east to west, with linear earthworks extending from its eastern and southern sides. Whether these differences reflect genuine change on the ground, improved surveying, or simply the conventions of different cartographers is not clear. A 1983 field description characterises it as an elongated subrectangular enclosure, a shape somewhere between a rectangle and an oval, with modern agricultural banks pressing in from outside and quarry holes cut into the ground to its north-east and south. From the air today, it reads as a roughly oval, tree-lined earthwork, the linear extensions still traceable as tree-lined features running eastward and southward from the main body.

What draws the eye, beyond the earthwork itself, is the concentration of activity in this small corner of Westmeath. A ringfort is a circular enclosure, typically of early medieval date, used as a farmstead or high-status residence, and there is one within sixty-five metres to the north-east. Closer still is the footprint of a military camp dated to the seventeenth century, a period of sustained conflict across Ireland, suggesting the slope at Shinglis was considered strategically useful at more than one point in its history. The enclosure sits among all of this without explanation, its original purpose still unresolved.