The enclosure is a cashel, the term used for a ringfort built from stone rather than earth and timber, and this one measures roughly 23 metres across. Most of it has been reduced over time to its foundations, the walls now standing only about 40 centimetres high and spread to a thickness of nearly two metres, the kind of spread that happens when dressed stonework collapses outward across centuries. What prevents the site from reading as simply a scatter of field rubble is a single upright orthostat at the north-east of the circuit, still standing a metre tall, a remnant of the original walling that gives a sense of how substantial the structure once was.

Cashels of this type belong broadly to the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, when enclosed farmsteads of stone were the standard unit of rural settlement across the west and upland midlands. The people who built and used them were farmers and their extended families, the enclosing wall providing both a physical boundary and a social one. At the south-west of this particular enclosure there appears to be a gap in the surviving wall-footings, interpreted as a possible entrance that was later destroyed or robbed for building material. The mountainous setting at Shanballyedmond suggests this was always a marginal location, the kind of upland ground that was worked and occupied but would never have been prime agricultural land.