It was recorded on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1933, as a subcircular enclosure measuring roughly 24 metres east to west and 20 metres north to south. Today, not a trace of it can be seen above ground.

Enclosures of this general type are among the most common, and most varied, features of the Irish archaeological landscape. The term covers everything from prehistoric settlement boundaries to early medieval ringforts, the latter being circular or roughly circular earthwork enclosures that once served as farmsteads and are found in considerable numbers across the island. Whether this particular example belonged to that tradition or to something earlier or later is now impossible to say with certainty, since the surface evidence has been entirely lost. What the 1933 map captured was already, in all likelihood, a faint impression in the ground, the kind of low earthwork that a century of agricultural activity can erase completely. The subcircular shape, a form slightly irregular rather than geometrically round, is itself typical of the casual geometry of hand-built earthworks raised without precise instruments.

There is something quietly sobering about a site whose entire surviving record amounts to a cartographic note and a set of approximate dimensions. The undulating pasture around Castle Ellen holds no outward sign of what was once mapped there, and visiting the area would offer nothing to see in the conventional sense. The significance, such as it is, lies not in the ground but in the gap between what was once recorded and what survives.