The problem is that no trace of it can actually be seen. What stands there now is a large, modern rectangular field of reclaimed pasture, its western half sloping gently down to the lakeshore, its eastern edge running alongside a north-south road, with blanket bog pressing in from the properties to the north and south.

The designation of a pre-bog field system here has a curious paper trail. The site did not appear in the Sites and Monuments Record of 1989, but was added to the Record of Monuments and Places in 1995 under the category of pre-bog field system, meaning a system of ancient land boundaries that was eventually buried and preserved beneath peat. Such systems, occasionally visible as earthworks or stone lines where bog has been stripped away, are known from various parts of the west of Ireland. But whoever added Tawnatruffaun to the record in 1995 left no field report, and the original source for the entry remains unknown. When the site was inspected in 2014, the verdict was unambiguous: reclamation works had almost certainly destroyed whatever had been there, leaving behind productive grazing land and no visible archaeology whatsoever.

The site sits in a landscape shaped as much by absence as by presence. The blanket bog that covers the neighbouring ground may have preserved similar features elsewhere on the ridge, but within this one reclaimed field, the evidence, if it ever corresponded to the record, is gone.