What remains is a series of gentle undulations in the earth, the kind that would pass unnoticed by anyone not looking for them. Beneath these subtle rises and dips lies the ghost of a ringfort, the circular or oval earthen enclosures that served as farmsteads and defended homesteads throughout early medieval Ireland, typically surrounded by one or more raised banks, or ramparts, and accompanying ditches.

The site was still visible enough in 1842 to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it appeared as a hachured circular area measuring roughly 35 metres in diameter. By the time the archaeologist Hartnett examined it in 1939, the fort had been levelled, but surface indications were still readable. His observations, published that year, described a single-ramparted oval enclosure measuring approximately 100 feet from north to south and 90 feet from east to west. That slight asymmetry, oval rather than truly circular, is not unusual among raths, as these earthwork enclosures are commonly known, though it gives this one a small particularity worth noting. The levelling of such sites was commonplace as agricultural land was improved and expanded across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and thousands of similar enclosures across Ireland were lost in the same way.

There is little to see at Coolkisha now beyond those low undulations in the pasture, but that is itself part of what makes it worth understanding. The 1842 map is the clearest record of what the site looked like intact, and Hartnett's measurements offer the last precise description from a time when something of the original form could still be read from the ground.