It is an arresting thing to consider: a monument that had stood in the Westmeath pasture for perhaps a thousand years or more, quietly weathering in poorly drained ground, until the age of the railway simply drew a line through it.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, are circular or oval enclosures defined by earthen banks and ditches, built predominantly during the early medieval period in Ireland as farmsteads or high-status residences. The Culleen More example was recorded on the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a circular, tree-lined earthwork, its outline still legible and apparently intact. By the time the revised 1913 twenty-five-inch OS map was produced, the railway had already cut through, and the shape had shifted in the cartographic record from circular to oval, the distortion of the surviving portions beginning to tell. When surveyors described the monument in 1970, they found a roughly oval area measuring approximately 50 metres northeast to southwest and 41 metres northwest to southeast. The damage was considerable on both sides of the railway cutting, and a semi-circular quarry had been dug into the ridge across the surviving southwest sector. The northeast sector had been levelled entirely. A modern field bank had absorbed portions of what would once have been a defined enclosing bank.

What remains today is a scrub-covered earthwork, visible in aerial photography as a bisected oval sitting in gently undulating pasture, with a second ringfort lying roughly 200 metres to the northwest. The two monuments occupy the same quiet landscape, though only one of them met the railway.