That cartographic silence is itself a small puzzle: a structure large enough to measure roughly 70 metres east to west and 53 metres north to south, defined by an earth and stone bank and a collapsed stone wall, somehow escaped the notice, or the interest, of the nineteenth-century surveyors who mapped this part of County Wicklow in considerable detail.

The enclosure is the kind of site that rewards slow looking. The northern arc of the boundary bank, about 2.8 metres wide and surviving to half a metre in height, has been substantially robbed out along its eastern stretch, the stone almost certainly quarried for a nearby field wall. At the WNW, where the oval narrows to a kind of point and the ground drops away, the bank has been reduced to a scarp standing about a metre high. The southern and south-western sections survive as a collapsed stone wall, lower and narrower than the bank to the north. The entrance, probably at the south, is marked by two upright stones, 0.70 and 0.85 metres high, with a third loosely wedged between them forming the western jamb; the eastern side of the gap is obscured by gorse, though a large stone some 2.8 metres away may once have defined it. Inside the enclosure, positioned to the south-east of centre, a small circular hut site sits quietly within the grassy interior. Enclosures of this general type, sometimes called raths or ringforts, were the fundamental unit of early medieval Irish rural settlement, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads, though not every example fits neatly into that category.

The site is intervisible with the large enclosure at Keadeen to the north and with Crossoona Rath in Boleycarrigeen to the south, a reminder that these structures were rarely isolated. From Kelshabeg the views extend south across the lowlands towards Mount Leinster, west to Kilranelagh Hill, and north-west towards Brusselstown and Spinans Hill. The gorse that rings the enclosure keeps the interior oddly clear, so the earthworks and wall remnants are legible once you are actually inside, even if the enclosing elements themselves are partly swallowed by scrub on approach.