What looks from a distance like a slight rise in the field is, on closer inspection, a well-preserved ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that thousands of early medieval Irish families would have recognised as home.

A ringfort, or rath, was typically a circular area of land enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly between 500 and 1000 AD. This example at Shinnagh is a fairly complete specimen. The enclosed area measures approximately 28 metres north to south and 27.2 metres east to west, elevated above the surrounding ground and defined on its western to northern arc by an earthen bank that, while only 0.2 metres high on the interior, rises to a more imposing 3.55 metres on the exterior, giving a clear sense of how deliberately the site was shaped to present a formidable face to the outside. On the northern to western side, a scarp, essentially a steep natural or cut slope, takes the place of the bank, dropping some 3.35 metres. Between bank and outer works runs a fosse, a defensive ditch, roughly 2.75 metres wide and 0.4 metres deep, with a further outer bank beyond it reaching nearly a metre in height. The combination of bank, fosse, and outer bank points to a site that was carefully engineered rather than casually thrown up.

The interior is uneven underfoot and partly obscured by trees and bushes that have taken hold over the centuries, and a wire fence cuts across the southern sector on an east-northeast to west-southwest axis, the ordinary agricultural life of the townland making its claim on the archaeology. None of that diminishes the essential strangeness of standing in a field and realising the ground beneath you was shaped by someone with a very particular purpose, probably well over a thousand years ago.