It is no longer there, at least not in any visible sense. Between a field survey conducted in 1973 and a follow-up visit in 1978, the monument had been bulldozed away, erased so thoroughly that its removal was simply noted as fact. What had been a substantial earthwork, roughly 36 metres across from north to south and 31 metres from east to west, enclosed by a broad earthen bank and a wide, shallow external fosse, was reduced in the space of a few years to nothing a person walking the field could identify.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from around the sixth to the twelfth century. They were built as farmsteads, the enclosing bank and fosse offering protection for a family and their livestock rather than any serious military defence. This particular example in Newtown had a notably sloping interior, the ground dropping appreciably from the north-north-east to the south-south-west within the enclosure. A measured profile was drawn by surveyors in 1973, which means a record of what the earthwork looked like does survive, even though the structure itself does not. That survey drawing became the last detailed account of a monument that was gone within five years.

What makes this site quietly remarkable now is how it persists despite its destruction. An aerial photograph taken by Digital Globe in November 2011, more than three decades after the bulldozing, still shows the ringfort as a faint crop-mark, the differential growth of grass or crops above the disturbed and compacted soil below tracing the ghost of the old enclosure onto the landscape. The earth remembers the shape even when nothing above ground remains to mark it.