What survives is a subcircular rath, roughly 51 metres east to west and 43 metres north to south, defined by two earthen banks with a fosse, or ditch, running between them. The outer bank has been almost entirely erased to the south-west, where a field boundary cuts clean across the monument at both the north-west and south-east, leaving little more than a trace in the ground to suggest what once stood there. Only the north-east entrance offers something like a legible feature.

Raths were enclosed farmsteads, typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1000 AD, built by farming families as much for social status as for defence. The earthen banks would originally have been topped with timber palisades or dense hedging, enclosing a central area used for dwellings and animal pens. The double-bank arrangement at Kilshanvy, with its intervening fosse, suggests a site of some local standing; single-bank examples are far more common across the Irish countryside. That this one has been so thoroughly disrupted by later agricultural boundaries is not unusual. Centuries of field clearance, drainage work, and enclosure have reduced hundreds of similar monuments across Connacht to equally fragmentary states.