The monument sits on the summit of a hill with open views across Lough Owel to the north, east, and south, a position that would have made it both defensible and conspicuous. Today, what remains is roughly semicircular, measuring around 33 metres on its northwest-to-southeast axis, and the road that severed the southwestern sector has left the original entrance impossible to identify.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is one of the most common monument types in the Irish landscape, typically a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or dwelling during the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1000 AD. The Walshestown example follows the pattern: a steep earthen bank and an outer fosse, which is the ditch dug to create the bank material and to reinforce the enclosure. The 1913 Ordnance Survey 25-inch map shows it as a semi-circular earthwork, and a description from 1972 records the bank as still clearly legible along the northwestern and northern arcs, though already levelled or much reduced across the southern and eastern reaches. The fosse survives most visibly from the northwest around to the north-northeast, with only faint traces elsewhere. Inside the enclosure, there is a slight slope facing northeast and faint traces of cultivation ridges running roughly northeast to southwest, suggesting the interior was at some point worked as agricultural ground, a common fate for monuments whose protective significance had long been forgotten.

From aerial photography the monument reads as a curved line of trees following the remaining earthwork, the kind of feature that is easier to read from above than from the roadside. The bank is best preserved along its northern arc, and it is there, if you happen to be passing on the road that bisects the site, that the scale and original ambition of the enclosure is easiest to imagine.