The enclosure is modest, roughly eighteen metres across, sitting on a grass-covered hillock amid rough, peaty grazing land. What makes it quietly arresting is not its condition but its position: the ground falls away on all sides, and the surrounding hills and mountains open out around it with the kind of clarity that would have made this a practical and deliberate choice of location for whoever built it.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when constructed from earth and bank rather than stone, were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century. They served as enclosed farmsteads, the bank and any accompanying ditch providing a boundary for livestock and a degree of security for the household within. The interior at Canshanavoe is disturbed and uneven, and the south-eastern to south-western sector has been further damaged by the removal of gravel and other groundworks, leaving that stretch of the perimeter truncated. More intriguing is the possible presence of a souterrain within the rath. Souterrains are underground stone-lined passages or chambers, built beneath ringfort interiors across Ireland, and thought to have served variously as places of refuge, cool storage for dairy produce, or escape routes. Whether the one recorded here is intact or accessible is not clear from what has been documented.