No earthwork rises from the ground, no ditch catches the light at a particular angle, no grass-covered ring gives the game away. The site survives, if that word still applies, almost entirely in the language of old maps and adjusted field boundaries.

The enclosure at Drangan Beg first appears as a roughly circular area on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, bisected north-east to south-west by the townland boundary, with a field boundary running north-west to south-east from its south-eastern quadrant. By the time the second edition maps were produced between 1901 and 1905, that same boundary shows a curving kink in the south-east quadrant, a small cartographic echo of whatever once defined the perimeter of the enclosure. Enclosures of this kind, broadly contemporary with the ringforts that dot the Irish countryside, were typically used to define settlement space or contain livestock in the early medieval period. A ringfort, a circular enclosed settlement usually marked by an earthen bank and ditch, sits approximately fifty metres to the north-west, suggesting this part of the hill was once a busier, more organised place than it appears today. The field boundary that preserved that telltale kink has since been removed entirely, and in 1927 electricity poles were erected somewhere in the vicinity, the modern world pressing in without much ceremony.

Any visitor hoping to examine the ground closely faces a practical obstacle that the survey record notes with admirable frankness: at the time of inspection, a bull was in the field, making close examination impossible. It is, perhaps, a fitting situation for a monument that has otherwise managed to keep its distance.