From above, the enclosure reads clearly as a subcircular shape roughly 47 metres across, its tree-lined perimeter giving the site an almost deliberate presence in the landscape. It is the kind of place that registers as slightly different before you can quite say why.

The earthwork is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a class of monument typically associated with early medieval settlement, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, when farming families enclosed their homesteads within a bank and ditch for reasons of status and security as much as defence. At Walshestown, the enclosing bank is steep-sided and still legible, and the ditch beyond it, known as a fosse, is wide and flat-bottomed. A possible causewayed entrance survives at the south-south-east, where a narrow raised strip of ground, about 3.5 metres wide at the top and tapering to a metre at the base, would once have allowed passage across the fosse. Inside the enclosure, the traces of several hut sites survive close to the inner face of the bank, suggesting this was a working settlement rather than a purely symbolic boundary. By the time the Ordnance Survey recorded the site in 1837, it appeared on the six-inch map as a circular enclosure already planted with trees around its edge; by the revised survey of 1913, the shape had been noted as slightly modified. A 1970 description captured the monument in considerable detail, though modern agricultural activity had already begun to leave its mark, with gaps cut at the north and east and a field boundary disturbing the outer perimeter along the south-west to north-west arc. A short stretch of bank on the outer edge of the fosse at the south-east may belong to a later phase of activity, added after the original construction.