The enclosure measures roughly thirty metres in diameter, and what remains of its defining bank is low enough to be easily overlooked on foot, running from east to north-west around the perimeter.

This type of monument, known as a rath or ringfort, was the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from around the sixth to the tenth century. A rath consisted of one or more earthen banks enclosing a roughly circular area in which a family would have kept their dwelling and sheltered their livestock. Tens of thousands once existed across the country, though many have been lost to agricultural clearance over the centuries. The survival of the Keelhilla example, even in reduced form, owes something to the nature of reclaimed ground, where large-scale disturbance was never quite thorough enough to erase it entirely. Its presence was formally brought to the attention of the National Monuments Service by Ros Ó Maoldúin, and the site was recorded in 2021.