Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when earthen, were enclosed farmsteads typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Most survive as raised circular platforms, their banks and ditches still legible in the landscape. The one at Pollanorman survives, but only just.

The site measures approximately 31 metres north to south and just under 30 metres east to west, encircled by a bank that spreads to around eight metres in width but rises no more than twenty to thirty centimetres above the surrounding ground. That is barely ankle height at its tallest. The best-preserved sections run around the south-east, south-west, and northern arcs of the circuit. A field boundary ditch running roughly north-west to south-east has clipped the north-eastern edge of the site, adding a further layer of erasure to what was already a much-diminished earthwork. Whether the levelling was deliberate land clearance or simply the slow attrition of wet ground and agricultural use over centuries is not recorded, but the low-lying, apparently reclaimed character of the field suggests the site has had a difficult relationship with water and plough alike for a long time. Its absence from the 1843 six-inch Ordnance Survey map implies it was already too faint to be mapped by then, which places its degradation well into the nineteenth century at the latest, if not considerably earlier.