Walk across it and you would likely notice nothing unusual; the ground gives nothing away except, perhaps, a slight curve in the field bank running north to east to south across roughly thirty metres. The rest of the site exists in a different register altogether, one only legible from the air.

The enclosure at Shelbaggan is classified as bivallate, meaning it was originally defined by two concentric rings of earthworks rather than one. It was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as early as 1839, which tells us that at least some physical trace was visible to surveyors at that time, with an external diameter of approximately 45 metres. What aerial photography has since revealed is considerably more complex. A fosse, the term for a ditch dug as part of a defensive or boundary earthwork, traces the inner circuit over a diameter of around 35 metres along its southern and western arcs. Beyond that, a second and more irregular enclosure, roughly 60 metres across in both axes, is defined by a shallower fosse feature. Both are visible as cropmarks, a phenomenon where buried ditches and banks cause subtle differences in crop growth above them, differences invisible at ground level but legible as tonal variation when seen from altitude. The site appeared on aerial photographs from the early campaign referenced in the county inventory, and was again confirmed through the Ordnance Survey Ireland series taken around 2000.

Enclosures of this kind are found widely across Ireland and are often associated with early medieval settlement, though their precise date and function at any individual site can be difficult to establish without excavation. At Shelbaggan, no excavation appears to have taken place, and the site remains largely unread. It is, in the most literal sense, a landscape that has not yet been opened.