Shanasta, or Seaneasta, translates roughly as "old abode", and that sense of long, layered occupation is exactly what the earthworks suggest. But the detail that lifts this site out of the ordinary is a piece of local tradition recorded by the nineteenth-century scholar John O'Donovan: the enclosure was used, at some point in the past, as a children's burial ground. These informal cillíní, as they are known, were typically used for unbaptised infants who were denied burial in consecrated ground under Catholic practice, and they frequently occupied pre-Christian earthworks, perhaps because such places already carried a sense of the liminal or the set-apart.

The ringfort itself is a univallate type, meaning it has a single enclosing bank rather than the double or triple rings found at more elaborate sites. That bank is substantial: up to four metres in external height, roughly three metres above the interior floor, and averaging seven metres wide at the base. The enclosed area measures approximately 34 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west. Around the outside runs a fosse, the shallow defensive ditch that typically accompanied such earthworks, measuring around 2.4 metres wide and one metre deep. It is best preserved along the northern and western arcs. Ringforts of this kind were the everyday farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, generally dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and several thousand survive across the country. What sets Shanasta apart is the convergence of that domestic past with the much more recent, and much quieter, history implied by its use as a burial place.