No earthwork, no raised mound, no visible trace of any kind survives at ground level. What is known of the place exists only as a cropmark, a faint shadow left in growing grain and visible only from the air, in a single aerial photograph that reveals the outline of a circular enclosure roughly 35 metres across, defined by what was once a fosse, a ditched boundary cut into the earth.

The cropmark is consistent with a ring-ditch or ring-barrow, both terms for a class of circular earthwork associated with burial and ritual activity in prehistoric Ireland. A second, fainter mark of a related site appears to the south-west on the same photograph, suggesting that the area once held at least a small cluster of such features. By the time John O'Donovan visited for the Ordnance Survey Letters in 1839, even the more prominent local monuments had already been erased. He noted, with some frustration, that he could find no remarkable moat or fort in Donore from which the placename might plausibly derive, and recorded that several raheens, small earthen ringforts, had been levelled within the townland. His remarks very likely refer to some of the same sites, this enclosure among them, already gone by the early nineteenth century after centuries of agricultural clearance.

The placename itself, Donore, carries the irony quietly. It derives from the Irish for a fort or assembly place, a name that outlasted the monuments it once described.