What makes this one quietly odd is not its survival but its near-invisibility. Despite sitting close to a coastline and within a cluster of similar monuments, it missed being recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map entirely, appearing only on a later Cassini edition dated 1915. Grass and blackthorn have since done their best to reclaim it.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1905, appears to have noted this site in passing, grouping it among what he described as "some seven or eight defaced forts at a place called Shanbally in Ballyryan, towards the sea." The cashel encloses a roughly subcircular area measuring about 21.5 metres north to south and 18.5 metres east to west. Sections of the drystone wall still stand to a height of 1.4 metres on the external face between the west-northwest and north, and internal facing on the west and west-northwest side, reaching between 0.6 and 1 metre high, is considered original. Other stretches have been rebuilt, including a later gap on the north-northeast side, and subsequent field walls have been tacked onto the cashel at three separate points around its perimeter. When the site was inspected in 1998, the interior had been cleared of vegetation, with the displaced stone piled against the inside of the wall to the northeast and heaped against the outside from the northeast round to the west. A large boulder sits to the south of centre, its purpose or origin unrecorded.