The site is known locally as a fort, a word that carries a long memory in the Irish countryside, and the ground still holds the ghost of a roughly circular form, defined now by little more than an overgrown scarp less than a metre high.

By the time the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in 1946, the enclosure was already reduced enough that cartographers could only render it as a schematic circle, approximately forty metres in diameter. What they were recording was almost certainly a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval farmstead in Ireland, typically comprising a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. Ringforts served as enclosed farmsteads from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century, and many thousands survive across the island in varying states of preservation. At Cooltymurraghy, the intervening decades since that map was made have been no kinder; the defining bank has slumped into a low scarp, and vegetation has done much of the rest. The persistence of the word fort in local memory is telling, though. Place-names and oral tradition have a tendency to outlast the physical fabric of a site by centuries, preserving a sense that the ground was once put to deliberate use even when the evidence has become nearly illegible.