The rath at Coolballyshane is not dramatic by any obvious measure, but it rewards the kind of attention that most people reserve for more celebrated sites. Ringforts, or raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead and its associated buildings within an earthen bank and surrounding ditch. What makes this one worth a closer look is the degree to which its original design remains legible in the landscape.

The enclosure is roughly circular, measuring 31 metres in diameter, and is defined by an inner earthen bank with an external fosse, which is the ditch that runs around the outside of the bank. That fosse measures nearly three metres wide. Beyond it sits a counterscarp bank, a secondary bank built up on the outer lip of the ditch, running from the north-north-west around to the south-south-west and standing 0.8 metres high. The inner bank reaches 1.85 metres on its exterior face in its best-preserved section along the southern arc, though overgrowth has obscured much of the western and north-western stretch. A deliberate entrance survives on the eastern side, where a dip in the bank aligns with a causeway, 3.4 metres wide, spanning the fosse. The fosse itself is scattered with loose stones. The site sits on a gentle east-facing slope just below the crest of a low rise, a position that would have offered modest elevation and drainage without advertising itself too conspicuously on the skyline. The record was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded in August 2011, with aerial photographs taken in March 2006 providing additional survey documentation.

The site sits within pasture and was, at the time of survey, recently cleared of the overgrowth that had been masking the western sections of the bank. The interior is level and grassed over. The eastern causeway entrance is the clearest point of orientation, and tracing the circuit of the bank from that point allows a reasonable sense of the full enclosure. The southern arc, where the bank is tallest and best preserved, gives the most coherent impression of the original structure. Aerial photographs from 2006 are held by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland and offer a useful overhead perspective on the geometry of the site, particularly the relationship between the bank, fosse, and counterscarp.