No earthwork rises above the grass, no ring of stones marks it out, and a casual visitor would have no reason to suspect anything was there at all. It exists, as far as present knowledge goes, only in a single aerial photograph taken in 1955, in which the cropmark or soil variation that betrays it is legible from the air but lost entirely at ground level.

Circular enclosures of this kind are a recurring feature of the Irish landscape. They range from the heavily banked ringforts that defined early medieval farmsteads to much slighter features whose function and date are harder to pin down. What exactly the Gortagass enclosure represented, who made it, and when, is not recorded. The 1955 aerial photograph, taken as part of a systematic coverage of the country, captured it at a moment when local conditions, perhaps a dry summer drawing moisture unevenly from the soil, made the buried outline readable. The rise on the northern side of the Roughty valley where it sits would have been a reasonable spot for a settlement or enclosure of some kind, elevated slightly above the valley floor. Since then, the land has been given over to leisure use, and whatever faint surface trace may once have existed has been lost to the development of the campsite.