Sitting on a south-west-facing slope just below the crest of a hill in Dooneens, Co. Cork, the enclosure was already documented on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a hachured circular form roughly 26 metres in diameter. Ringforts, or raths, were typically enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, their circular earthen banks serving as a boundary between domestic space and the wider landscape. This one did not survive long after its first official record.

According to a source cited by Broker in 1937, the fort was knocked by a man named Dan O'Sullivan in 1855, a fate that befell many such monuments during the nineteenth century, when land clearance and agricultural improvement took precedence over any sense of archaeological value. The destruction was not quite total, however. An arc of scarp, standing about 1.1 metres high with a slight internal lip, still runs from the south-west around to the west-north-west, and a low rise across the northern and eastern portions traces the ghost of the levelled bank. A modern drain has been cut outside the surviving scarp, adding another layer of disturbance to the site. Perhaps the most intriguing detail is a possible souterrain within the interior. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage associated with early medieval settlement, sometimes used for storage or refuge, and their presence beneath ringforts is not uncommon in Cork and Kerry. Whether the one at Dooneens remains accessible or intact is unclear, but its existence hints that what O'Sullivan dismantled above ground may not have been the whole story.