The enclosure at Cloonshee is modest by any measure: a grass-covered area roughly 17 metres across, its outline now held together more by the traces of dry vegetation than by any substantial earthwork. The surviving arc of bank, running roughly south-south-east to south-south-west, is little more than half a metre high on its outer face, and just four and a half metres wide. What the ground shows today is a remnant, but a legible one.

Both the 1837 and 1914 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the feature as a circular enclosure with a diameter of around 30 metres, suggesting that what survives on the surface now represents only a portion of what was once a more complete earthwork. Drumlins, the elongated oval hills formed from glacial debris during the last ice age, were favoured locations for early medieval enclosures in Ireland; their elevated, well-drained crests offered visibility and a degree of natural definition to any structure built upon them. The Cloonshee enclosure sits within a notably dense local cluster. A rath, the term for a ringfort typically defined by one or more circular earthen banks and used as a farmstead enclosure during the early medieval period, lies roughly 200 metres to the west-south-west, and a second rath sits only about 40 metres to the south-east. Whether the Cloonshee enclosure belongs to the same broad tradition as these neighbours, or served a different purpose altogether, is not recorded.