No sign announces it. No path leads deliberately to it. The interior is level, the margins densely overgrown, and a ring of trees has grown up around it over time, making it legible from the air long before it becomes obvious on foot. It is the kind of feature that rewards a second look at a map before you go looking at the ground.

The earthwork in the townland of Ballyshonikin was already old enough to be worth recording when the Ordnance Survey produced its first six-inch maps of Ireland in 1840, on which it appears as a raised circular area defined by a scarp, a steep slope forming the edge of an elevated feature. By the time the twenty-five-inch edition was published in 1897, a field drain had been cut across it from the north-east, intersecting the monument and complicating its profile. A detailed survey carried out in 1999 measured the outer fosse, a ditch dug around an earthwork, at an overall width of 5.35 metres with an internal depth of 2.2 metres on the north-east to south-east arc, and a second external fosse on the remaining arc measuring 3.3 metres wide. The fosses were waterlogged at the time of the survey and may have been adapted as field drains, which makes it genuinely difficult to say where drainage engineering ends and original archaeology begins. The monument sits approximately 100 metres north-west of the townland boundary with Ballymacshaneboy, on a gentle north-north-westerly slope with open views in every direction.

The earthwork is visible on satellite imagery, including Google Earth orthoimages and a Digital Globe image taken between 2011 and 2013, where the circle of trees gives it away clearly. On the ground, access is across private farmland, so permission from the landowner would be necessary before approaching. The surrounding pasture is level, which makes the slight elevation of the interior platform more noticeable once you are standing near it. The waterlogged fosses are likely to be at their most pronounced after wet weather, which in Limerick is not a rare condition. A sketch plan, oblique aerial photograph, and orthoimages were compiled as part of the Archaeological Survey of Ireland record, uploaded in November 2021.