A circular earthwork roughly 28.5 metres in diameter once sat here, and when the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was published in 1837, the surveyors labelled it a fort. By the time the revised edition appeared in 1883, even that confidence had faded; the designation had become simply "Site of", a cartographic shrug suggesting the feature was already diminishing. It took until 1987 for the structure to be properly identified as a ring-barrow, a type of funerary monument in which a burial mound is enclosed by a circular bank and ditch, commonly associated with the Bronze Age.

The confusion between ring-barrows and raths or forts is not unusual. To a casual observer, or indeed to a nineteenth-century surveyor working at pace across the Irish midlands, a weathered circular earthwork could suggest a defensive or domestic enclosure rather than a burial site. The two forms can look similar once the defining features have eroded. At Mosstown, the monument has since been levelled entirely, most likely through agricultural activity on what remains working pasture. What survives now is not the earthwork itself but the faint trace of its perimeter, still readable in the landscape as a circular outline in the grass.