The cashel at Kilshanvy offers almost none of that legibility. A cashel is a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, typically dating to the early medieval period in Ireland, and in its original form this one would have enclosed a roughly subcircular space measuring about 36 metres east to west and 33 metres north to south. What survives now is considerably harder to read.

The monument sits on a gentle rise in undulating grassland, which would once have given its occupants a modest but useful vantage over the surrounding landscape. Of the enclosing drystone wall, only a short stretch remains visible, a straight 9-metre length on the western interior edge, now grassed over and partly buried beneath a later field wall that has essentially colonised the fabric of the older structure. From the south-south-east round to the south-west, that same drystone wall survives but is overlain and obscured. Between the south-west and north-west, nothing of the enclosure breaks the surface at all. From the north-west back round to the south-south-east, the boundary can only be inferred from a scarp, a low slope in the ground where the edge of the old platform has settled or eroded into the field around it. In other words, the cashel has largely been absorbed into the working landscape, its boundary now more of an impression than a wall.