What makes the Bunkilla example quietly compelling is not what survives, but how precisely its disappearance can be traced through cartographic evidence. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as a hachured circular enclosure roughly fifteen metres in diameter. By 1903, the same survey showed something noticeably smaller, a hachured mound of around nine metres enclosed by a fosse. That fosse is the ditch element of the ring barrow, typically dug to separate the burial mound from the surrounding world, sometimes, as here, becoming waterlogged over time. The outer bank, standing three to four feet high when measured, completed the enclosure.

The only detailed description of the monument in its more intact state comes from Hartnett, writing in 1939. At that point the central platform was still discernible, ringed by its waterlogged fosse, with the outer earthen bank encircling the whole complex. A causeway of field clearance stones crossed the fosse at the western entrance, a practical addition that may have been introduced at any point in the monument's long post-prehistoric life. Such stones, gathered when farmers cleared ground for cultivation, were often pressed into secondary uses without any awareness of, or particular concern for, what lay beneath. By the time the site was formally assessed, it had been levelled and the surrounding field fences removed, leaving no surface trace in the pasture.