No bank, no earthwork, no trace of a boundary. The monument had been levelled, leaving only pasture rolling away across undulating ground, with a wet hollow off to the south-east. Yet a century and a half earlier, nineteenth-century cartographers had recorded something considerably more complex here, and the gap between those two pictures is quietly telling about how much of Ireland's early landscape has simply been absorbed back into the farmland around it.

When the Ordnance Survey worked through this part of Westmeath in the 1830s, they mapped a D-shaped earthwork roughly 40 metres north to south and 33 metres east to west, enclosed by a bank and subdivided internally into distinct areas: a small square enclosure in the northern corner, a long rectangular space running south from it, and a semi-circular area pressing against both to the east. A spring well sat just outside the curvilinear bank on the eastern side. The OS Memoranda, the field notes kept by surveyors at the time, describe it as an earthen enclosure with traces of stone running through it, as though the remains of a building were embedded within the bank or just beside it, with the well close by. By the time the revised 25-inch map was published in 1913, the broader D-shaped enclosure had already contracted in the record to just the small northern square, measuring roughly 11 metres by 7.5 metres. The scholar R.A.S. Macalister, working from what was visible to him, described only a rectangular enclosure. What he and the later cartographers were seeing was likely only the most durable corner of something that had once been considerably more articulated. The apparent natural hillock indicated on some OS editions may itself represent nothing more than that surviving northern quadrant of the earlier, larger earthwork.