By the time anyone thought to look closely, the ground had already swallowed it. The site survives only as a notation on a 1937 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it was recorded as a hachured penannular raised area, meaning a roughly circular earthwork, open at one end, with its gap facing south, and measuring approximately thirty metres in diameter. Hachuring on OS maps indicates an earthwork with some visible relief at the time of survey; shortly after, it was levelled, most likely through agricultural activity, and today there is no surface trace whatsoever.

What makes the site quietly interesting is less what remains than what the map captured before it disappeared. Penannular enclosures of this kind are generally associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, close relatives of the ringfort, an enclosed farmstead type that was common across the Irish countryside from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. The gap in the earthwork facing south is a recurring feature, possibly connected to prevailing wind direction or social convention around entranceways. The enclosure at Cooldurragha did not stand alone, either. A ringfort recorded separately lies approximately fifty metres to the south-east in the same field, suggesting this corner of north Cork once held a cluster of enclosed activity, the kind of paired or grouped settlement pattern that occasionally points to related farmsteads or successive phases of occupation on the same ground. Both sites are now farmland, one reduced to a map reference, the other presumably in a similarly diminished state.