The raised area measures roughly 42 metres in diameter, but its defining scarp, the low bank that marks its edge, rises only about 20 centimetres above the surrounding ground. That is less than the height of a brick. There is no fosse, the defensive ditch that typically accompanies this type of monument, which makes the site harder still to read in the landscape.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular enclosure, usually of early medieval date, that once served as a farmstead or a place of some local social significance. Raths are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, with tens of thousands recorded across the country, yet the very ordinariness of their distribution can obscure how much has been lost. At Loughsheedan, the losses are visible in the monument itself. A field wall running roughly north-northwest to south-southeast now divides the enclosure into two roughly equal halves, and the portion to the northeast of this wall has been levelled entirely. The original entrance, which in a well-preserved rath might be traced through a gap in the bank or a causeway across the fosse, is here unrecognisable. What survives is, in effect, the ghost of a boundary, the slight rise of a scarp that once enclosed a life now entirely beyond recovery.