The one at Ballyshane measures roughly 22 metres in diameter, a modest example of its type, but its attachment to a second enclosure on its south-western side gives the pair an unusual conjoined character that sets them apart from the lone examples scattered across the Irish countryside.

A rath, as ringforts are sometimes called in Irish placename and archaeological usage, was typically a circular earthen enclosure built during the early medieval period, most likely as a farmstead or high-status residence, defined by a raised bank and a surrounding ditch known as a fosse. At Ballyshane, the earthen bank still stands to about 0.8 metres in height, and the external fosse remains legible along the south-south-east arc through to the point where the enclosure meets its neighbour to the south-west. The configuration of two such enclosures sharing a boundary, rather than sitting independently, was recorded as far back as the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, where both appear as hachured circular outlines, the cartographic convention of the time for depicting earthen banks and raised ground. The fact that the monument was already precisely mapped almost two centuries ago in pasture, on level ground, suggests it has sat quietly in agricultural land for a very long time, neither excavated nor particularly disturbed.