Beneath the encroaching bushes and trees, an early medieval ringfort sits almost intact, its circular bank still legible in the landscape despite centuries of agricultural activity pressing in from every side. The eastern face has been partly buried under dumped earth and stones, and a farm passage clips the outer ditch to the north, yet enough survives to make the structure worth pausing over.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when built primarily from earthen banks, were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. They served as farmsteads and status markers, the enclosing bank and ditch providing both a physical boundary and a social statement. The example at Coolballyshane follows this familiar pattern: a circular enclosure thirty-four metres in diameter, defined by a combined earth-and-stone bank with an external fosse, the shallow ditch that runs from the east-southeast around to the northwest. The bank itself stands to an internal height of 1.35 metres and an external height of 1.85 metres, the extra height on the outside reinforcing the impression of a deliberate defensive or imposing profile. The southeastern to southwestern arc is the best-preserved section, documented by Denis Power and recorded by aerial photography taken in March 2006 as part of the Archaeological Survey of Ireland.

The site sits in open pasture, and the approach is shaped by the farm passage that skirts the western and north-northeastern edges of the enclosure. That same passage clips the fosse at the north, so the ditch there is somewhat compromised, but elsewhere the earthworks are more legible. The interior is level, though currently given over to nettles and thistles, which are common colonisers of undisturbed ground and something of an inadvertent indicator of how little the enclosed area has been ploughed or deeply disturbed. The opening on the eastern side, roughly 2.7 metres wide and cut through both the dumped material and the bank, may represent an original or later entrance point. The vegetation masking the southeastern arc means the bankline reads more clearly from a slight distance, and the aerial photographs held by the Archaeological Survey give a cleaner sense of its full extent than a ground-level visit alone can offer.