The site takes the form of a sub-oval area roughly 30 metres north to south and 27 metres east to west, defined by a levelled bank that still measures over eight metres in overall width, even if its internal height has been reduced to little more than 35 centimetres above the interior surface. On the south-east to north-west arc, the bank is accompanied by the shallow trace of a possible fosse, the term for a ditch that typically ran alongside an enclosing bank, and beyond that a faint outer bank, now barely perceptible at a height of around ten centimetres externally. These are slight remains, but their pattern is coherent.

What gives the interior some added interest is that it is not simply flat. The northern sector sits higher than the rest, the two levels divided by a low east-west scarp about two and a half metres wide and 40 centimetres high. This kind of internal division sometimes reflects the different functional zones within an early medieval ringfort, a common class of enclosed farmstead in Ireland used roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, though nothing in the surviving evidence here firmly confirms that date or function. Two rectangular enclosures lie close by, one approximately ten metres to the north-east and another about three metres to the west, suggesting this part of Shanakyle was once a busier, more structured landscape than the present pasture implies.