Very little of it is visible today, which is precisely what makes it worth knowing about. The land around Shankill carries the ghost of a small but formally organised settlement, complete with burgages, the individual plots allocated to borough tenants under medieval town law, and cultivated demesne land, yet it is easy to pass through without suspecting any of this lies beneath the surface.

The borough of Shankill was probably established in the early thirteenth century, according to research by Bradley and King. Its ecclesiastical associations were significant from the outset; the Archbishop of Dublin appears to have used it as a key base in the south of his county. A permit issued in 1229 to clear woodland on the manor tells us that much of the surrounding land was densely wooded at that point, suggesting the settlement was still being carved out of its landscape. By 1326, a formal extent, a document recording the value and composition of an estate, lists seventeen burgages alongside demesne land under arable cultivation, giving a clearer picture of a functioning if modest borough in the later medieval period. The settlement itself was probably situated in the ground between two surviving monuments: a tower house and a church, both of which remain recorded in the archaeological register for the area.

The site sits in low-lying ground and has been considerably altered by landscaping over time, so a visitor will not find obvious earthworks or dramatic ruins marking out the borough's footprint. The tower house and the medieval church are the most tangible anchors for orientation, and locating the space between them gives the best sense of where the inhabited core once lay. Because the area has been modified, the surface evidence is subtle; this is a place that rewards a little prior reading rather than an impromptu visit, and OS maps or the Sites and Monuments Record entries for the associated monuments help considerably in making sense of what the eye alone cannot easily recover.