It measured roughly seventeen metres north to south and thirteen metres east to west, sitting within a small tree plantation on flat, poorly drained floodplain ground at the edge of an upland area. By the time a field inspector visited in 2001, there was nothing left above ground to indicate it had ever existed.

That gap between cartographic record and physical reality is not unusual in the Irish landscape, but it is always a little unsettling. The 1840 Ordnance Survey was extraordinarily thorough, and features that made it onto those early six-inch sheets were generally visible and legible to the surveyors who walked the ground. What the Bonarea enclosure actually was remains unclear. The term enclosure covers a broad range of archaeological features, from prehistoric farmsteads bounded by earthen banks to medieval garden plots and post-medieval field structures. A townland drain running through the south-west sector on a north-west to south-east axis may have contributed to the erosion or obscuring of whatever earthwork once defined the site, and the waterlogged floodplain setting would not have helped preservation. The plantation of trees noted in 1840 may itself have been planted over, or in the proximity of, an already fading feature.