What was once a substantial early medieval enclosure, probably used as a farmstead and defined by a stone-faced earthen bank, has been so thoroughly absorbed into the surrounding field system that its outline is now only legible from the air. Ringforts, also known as raths or cashels depending on their construction, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a family's dwelling and outbuildings within a circular earthen or stone bank. This particular example, known locally as a cashel, once had an overall diameter of around 36 metres, making it a reasonably substantial structure, but today the bank that defined it has been folded into the modern field boundaries and the interior levelled.

The site's gradual erasure is documented across a span of more than a century of mapping. The 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows it clearly as a circular enclosed area, with field boundaries already beginning to radiate outward from its southern and eastern edges, a sign that agricultural reorganisation was already working around and against it. By the 1897 twenty-five-inch OS map, the enclosure was sub-circular in outline, measuring roughly 17 to 18 metres internally and 32 to 33 metres externally, with the bank increasingly merged into the post-1700 field system on its southern and western sides. O'Kelly, writing in 1943, recorded it as a collapsed stone fort with a stone-faced earthen bank so degraded that no entrance could be identified, and noted that it sat in what he described as rich lowland. Since then, Google Earth imagery has confirmed that levelling is now complete, the original bank surviving only as a slight rise along the field boundary from south to west.

For anyone making their way out to Fanningstown, the site sits in pasture roughly 123 metres northwest of the stream marking the townland boundary with Garryellen. There is nothing dramatic to greet a visitor on the ground; the satisfaction here is in knowing what to look for, a subtle change in the lie of the land, a field boundary that curves with slightly more purpose than its neighbours. Consulting the 1840 or 1897 OS maps beforehand, both available through the OSi historical map viewer, gives a clearer sense of the original form. The site is on private farmland, so any visit would require the landowner's permission.