What was once a clearly defined earthwork has been reduced, over generations of agricultural use, to a faint circular trace that only cropmarks really betray.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were typically enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, defined by one or more earthen banks and a surrounding ditch called a fosse. The Scurlockstown example sits on slightly elevated ground, with poorly drained pasture to its south and west, a topographical detail that would have made the rise a logical place to settle. When the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1837, the earthwork was recorded on the six-inch map as a roughly oval shape, with a field boundary incorporated into its north-western arc, suggesting the monument had already been pressed into practical use by that point. The same survey's Fair Plan annotated it as a fort but rendered it with a roughly triangular outline, a discrepancy that hints at how much the original form had already shifted by then. By the time the revised twenty-five-inch map was produced in 1913, the monument had effectively vanished from the cartographic record altogether. A field survey carried out in 1983 found a raised circular area approximately 29 metres in diameter, with the infilled fosse, about 3 metres wide, surviving best on the western side, and only faint traces of an outer bank remaining. The north-eastern to eastern perimeter was barely traceable at all. More recently, aerial photography has revealed a roughly rectilinear cropmark, the differential growth of vegetation above the buried fosse making the monument legible in a way that walking the ground no longer quite allows, with the clearest definition appearing along the south-eastern and south-western sides.