The place was recorded on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps as a circular enclosure with buildings running along its northern edge, and locally it was known as House Fort, a name that suggests the memory of something substantial. By the time anyone thought to measure and classify it formally, only a faint circular platform roughly 27 metres across could be made out on the ground. Today even that is barely perceptible.

In 1914, a surveyor named Neary documented what was still standing. He identified the site as a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks. At Carrowntryla, Neary described the remains of a wall on the northern rampart, some 1.2 metres thick, 2.4 metres high, and 7.3 metres long, oriented east to west. He speculated that it may have been a dwelling associated with the De Burgos, the Anglo-Norman family who held extensive territory in Connacht from the thirteenth century onward. Nothing of that wall survives now. More arresting was his description of an obelisk in the interior of the enclosure, with a grave to its north side and five quernstones, the circular grinding stones used to mill grain, arranged upon it. By the time the third edition of the OS six-inch map was published in 1932, this feature was labelled a Burial Vault. It is dedicated to a woman named Anne Handcock and dated 1818. The combination is an odd one: a nineteenth-century funerary monument, inscribed and formally dedicated, placed inside what was already an ancient earthwork, and decorated with quernstones that carry their own much older associations. Of the five quernstones Neary counted, only one remains visible today.