Both surveys recorded the same circular enclosure, roughly 25 metres in diameter, sitting at the top of a rise with open views northward across a landscape of mixed bogland and pasture. At some point between the second mapping and the present day, it was levelled during land reclamation, and the ground now offers no visible trace of what once stood there.

Circular enclosures of this kind are a common enough feature of the Irish countryside, typically interpreted as the remains of a rath or ringfort, an earthen bank and ditch enclosing a farmstead, most often associated with the early medieval period. What makes the Carrowbeg example quietly notable is not what survives but what the maps record. The 1838 OS six-inch survey, produced as part of the first large-scale systematic mapping of Ireland, caught it at a time when the earthwork was still legible in the landscape. By the time the 1916 revision came around, it was still there. Somewhere in the decades that followed, the decision was made to clear the ridge for agriculture, and the enclosure was erased. The site now exists primarily as a cartographic ghost, present on paper and absent on the ground.