The surrounding land has been progressively extracted until the fort now projects into a large open quarry on three sides, effectively islanded by industry. What survives is a circular earthwork roughly 48 metres in diameter, recorded as far back as the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 and still visible on satellite imagery today. Aerial photographs taken in July 1967 revealed something the ground-level view conceals entirely: this is in fact a trivallate ringfort, meaning it originally had three concentric enclosing banks and ditches, with the two outer fosses now only detectable as cropmarks in dry summers. Three neighbouring enclosures that once stood within a few hundred metres, spaced roughly 122 metres apart from one another, have been entirely quarried away.

The site's more intimate history emerged in the nineteenth century, when the antiquary J. G. A. Prim published accounts of excavations carried out on several of the Dunbell enclosures in the early 1850s. The circumstances were not exactly scholarly. One of the neighbouring raths had been levelled for tillage some years before without any investigation; a second was partially dug over in May 1842 to spread its dark, organically rich clay as agricultural manure; and a third underwent the same process and yielded, almost incidentally, a remarkable collection of material. That third enclosure produced an enormous quantity of animal bone, dominated by deer and cattle, distributed through the inner fosse and layered through the central mound to a depth of several feet. Alongside the bones were eight or ten small circular cooking pits, unfaced and simply dug into the floor of the rath, each packed with charcoal, burned stones, and charred bones. Several appeared to have served as furnaces for ironworking, given the slag-like material and the iron objects recovered nearby, among them an axe-head, knife blades, a chisel, a small reaping-hook, and a horseshoe. The finds also included portions of nine rotary querns (the hand-mills used for grinding grain), one decorated with concentric mouldings, hone stones, bone pins, beads and a comb, bronze fibulae (decorative cloak-fasteners), circlets of black slate and jet, a small iron square bell, and a handful of fragments from a single coarse glazed vessel. Prim noted with some emphasis that no further pottery of any kind was found in any of the Dunbell raths after that first 1852 discovery.