The Office of Public Works correspondence files record his verdict plainly: the site, he wrote, was simply a tree-ring, the ground around it characterised by rock outcrop and formerly planted with larches, and the stone wall enclosing it could be removed without concern. It was, in short, waved aside and left to the Land Project schemes of the era. The enclosure at Garryroan survived anyway, though not without cost.

The site is a disturbed, roughly circular enclosure measuring some 45 metres across on its north-west to south-east axis. An enclosure of this kind would originally have consisted of a continuous earthen bank, possibly with a ditch, forming a defined boundary around a central area; such features in Irish landscapes range in date and function from prehistoric settlements to early medieval farmsteads. At Garryroan, the eastern side has been levelled entirely, probably by repeated ploughing, while the western bank has been absorbed into a curving field boundary that is now part earthen bank, part stone wall. In the north-western quadrant, large boulders of uprooted bedrock have been heaped onto the low surviving bank, whose crest measures less than a metre wide and stands only half a metre or so above the interior ground level. Upslope to the south, a cairn is visible, suggesting this corner of Tipperary held more than passing significance at some point in the distant past.

What makes the site quietly instructive is not what remains but what nearly did not. The 1956 dismissal reflects an attitude that was widespread in mid-century Ireland, when land reclamation and agricultural improvement frequently took precedence over earthworks that could not be immediately classified or valued. The western side, spared the plough because it became overgrown with brambles, is in some ways preserved by neglect rather than care. The monument endures in a partial, battered form, its original shape still legible if you know what to look for, while the field boundary that was supposed to erase it has instead become part of it.