Walk the field today and there is nothing to see; no raised bank, no hollow, no trace of what was once a substantial enclosed settlement. The only way to spot it is from the air, where the buried ditches alter how the soil retains moisture, causing the grass and crops above them to grow at slightly different rates. The resulting cropmark, visible on aerial photography, reveals the ghost of a bivallate enclosure, a ringfort defined by two concentric ditches rather than one, with an internal diameter of around thirty metres and an external diameter of around forty.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by an earthen bank and ditch. The bivallate variety, with its doubled defences, suggests a site of some status. At Sarshill, the inner fosse, a fosse being simply a ditch, was noticeably wider than the outer one, roughly four metres across, and there was a clear entrance gap on the north-eastern side. Archaeological investigations carried out in 2010 exposed approximately one fifth of the enclosing double fosse, enough to confirm what the aerial photographs had suggested but not enough to tell the full story of who built it or when it was in use.