They sit as raised circular platforms in the landscape, their earthen banks still legible after a thousand or more years. The one at Monkstown in County Westmeath does the opposite: it has almost entirely disappeared, and what survives is little more than a gentle curve in a field fence. That curve, running from the south-west around to the north-west, is all that remains of a bank that once formed the enclosing wall of a ringfort, the kind of circular earthwork enclosure that served as a farmstead and domestic compound throughout early medieval Ireland. The site sits on a low ridge in undulating grassland, with open views in every direction, exactly the kind of position an early farmer would have chosen.

The 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map records what was already a diminished monument by that point, showing an oval-shaped enclosure marked simply as "fort". Even then, the landscape around it was in active agricultural use: a gravel pit lay immediately to the south-west and a lime kiln to the north. A lime kiln was a simple stone structure used to burn limestone and produce quicklime for fertilising fields, and its presence beside the fort suggests the surrounding land was being worked hard. The levelling of the ringfort's bank was most likely a consequence of that same agricultural pressure, land being cleared and reclaimed over generations until the enclosure was reduced to the faint arc visible today. A second ringfort is recorded roughly 200 metres to the north-east, suggesting this was once a more densely settled corner of Westmeath than its current quietness implies.