What makes it quietly remarkable now is precisely its absence. Where an Early Medieval farmstead once announced itself on the skyline, the ground appears to have been levelled entirely, the earthworks absorbed back into the agricultural landscape sometime before 2011.

A ringfort, or rath, is one of the most common monument types in Ireland, essentially a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a defended farmstead during the Early Medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. When this example at Sleveen was recorded in 1987, it still retained a legible form: a circular interior roughly twenty-five metres across, bounded by a low earthen bank and an outer fosse, a term for the shallow ditch that typically runs outside such an enclosure. The fosse at that point was barely more than a depression, its depth between ten and twenty centimetres, suggesting the monument had already been under pressure from farming activity for some time. A narrow original entrance, about two metres wide, survived on the south-east side. Ordnance Survey mapping from 1947 captured a slightly different picture, recording the enclosure at a broader diameter of around thirty-five metres and noting an outer bank running from south around to the north-west, details that hint at a more substantial structure than what the 1987 survey encountered. The discrepancy between the two measurements may reflect decades of gradual erosion, or it may simply indicate differences in how the monument's outer limits were interpreted at each recording. Either way, by the time satellite imagery was examined in April 2011, the monument appeared to have been levelled altogether.