Roughly thirty metres across, it is the kind of structure that can look, at first glance, like nothing more than an overgrown field boundary, until you notice that it forms a near-perfect ring, and that a gap on the north-western side, about two and a half metres wide, may mark the original entrance.

This is a rath, the most common type of ringfort found across Ireland, typically constructed during the early medieval period as a defended farmstead enclosure for a single family and their livestock. The bank here is earthen with some stone inclusions, standing under a metre high on either side, with deciduous trees growing intermittently along its crest. Modest as that sounds, it has survived largely intact through centuries of agricultural use. By the 1840s, Ordnance Survey field workers were already noting two raths on the northern side of the townland of Shinnagh, and this is almost certainly one of them. By the 1940s, when local knowledge was gathered as part of the Irish Schools' Manuscript collection, the site was recorded as lying within the landholding of a Daniel O'Keeffe, placing it within living memory of people who would have known it simply as a feature of the farm rather than a monument of historical interest.

The cattle breaks visible along the bank are a reminder that the site has continued to function as working pasture rather than a preserved monument, which is both its vulnerability and, in a way, part of its story. The entrance gap on the north-west and the line of the bank are the details most worth looking for, small but legible traces of a settlement pattern that once covered almost every townland in the country.