Where fieldworkers once recorded a prehistoric burial mound, there is today little more than a scatter of boulders on a rough patch of ground, most likely the result of agricultural clearance. The monument, it seems, did not survive the decades between its identification and its re-examination.

When two fieldworkers visited the site in 1983 and 1984, they found an artificial mound, roughly oval in shape, measuring approximately 4 metres east to west and 8 metres north to south, rising to a maximum height of one metre on its western side before sloping gradually eastward. Large stones protruded from the mound on its eastern and northern edges, and rose bushes were scattered across it, with trees and scrub obscuring the northern end. Both fieldworkers noted a faint suggestion of a ditch running along the south, south-southwest, and western sides. That detail mattered. A bowl-barrow is a prehistoric funerary monument, typically a rounded earthen mound encircled by a ditch, and it is the presence or absence of that encircling ditch that distinguishes one class of barrow from another. If the ditch the fieldworkers observed was genuine, the Gaddrystown monument could be classified as a small bowl-barrow; if not, it was more likely a simple mound barrow. The question was never definitively settled. When David McGuinness surveyed the site in 2013 and published his findings in 2014, the mound itself could no longer be confirmed. The jumble of boulders that remained offered no clear answers.

The Gaddrystown site sits in undulating pasture land in County Westmeath, on a slight rise within what was, at least in the 1980s, a level field. Whether any surface trace of the monument persists today is uncertain, and the site serves less as a place to visit than as a reminder of how quickly the physical record of prehistory can disappear, not through dramatic events, but through the quiet, incremental pressures of farming life.