It does not announce itself with earthworks or visible stonework; at ground level, according to survey records, there is simply nothing there. What survives is essentially cartographic, a circle drawn on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840, marking a boundary that once had a very practical, unglamorous purpose.

The enclosure appears on that early OS map wrapped around what was then a working mill, and the leading interpretation is that it was built not for defence or ceremony but to keep cattle away from the sails of a windmill. This is less eccentric than it sounds. Windmill sails, turning low to the ground, posed a genuine hazard to wandering livestock, and the same logic appears to have applied at the well-documented mills in Skerries, further north along the Dublin coast, where comparable enclosures served the same function. The arrangement at Walshestown fits that pattern, a ring of boundary, probably a wall or bank, thrown up around the mill to create a clear working zone. Geraldine Stout, who compiled the original record, noted the parallel with Skerries, and Healy's 1975 survey confirmed that nothing of the structure remains visible today.

For anyone curious enough to visit the area, the site sits on a natural rise in the landscape, which may be the only physical clue that anything of historical interest was once here. There is no marker, no ruin to photograph, and no feature that would distinguish this particular patch of ground from its surroundings. The value is really in knowing what to look for on a historical map rather than in the field. The 1840 OS six-inch sheets are freely available through the historic map viewer at osi.ie, where the enclosure can be seen in its original surveyed form, a quiet circle around a mill that no longer turns.