What makes it quietly odd is the gap between what the maps once suggested and what the ground now shows. The first Ordnance Survey of Ireland, completed in the 1830s, recorded it as a circular wooded feature and labelled it in gothic lettering as a fort, a term the surveyors used for a range of enclosed sites, most commonly a ringfort, the type of circular earthwork farmstead that was once the standard settlement form across early medieval Ireland. By 1907, a revised edition of the same mapping showed something rather different: a small D-shaped feature, suggesting the enclosure had either changed or been more carefully observed.

Today the site measures roughly 35 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and about 30 metres across from northwest to southeast, defined not by any dramatic earthwork but by existing field banks and hedges that seem to follow or preserve the line of the original boundary. There is no visible fosse, the encircling ditch that typically accompanies a ringfort, and no identifiable entrance survives. The drumlin setting is itself worth noting. Drumlins are the smooth, elongated hills of glacially deposited material that characterise much of the drumlin belt running across counties Monaghan, Cavan, and Fermanagh, and they were frequently chosen as elevated positions for early enclosures, offering both drainage and a degree of natural prominence. Whether the fort at Gola Irish ever had a fosse, or whether it was always a more modest enclosed space of a different type, is now difficult to say from the surface evidence alone.