The site at Maddockstown was recorded on that original six-inch map as a roughly circular earthwork, around 32 metres in diameter, sitting on the southern end of a small rise in what is now pastureland. By the time surveyors returned to update their charts, it was gone from the landscape entirely, levelled at some point during those six decades, most likely by agricultural clearance.

Enclosures of this kind, typically a raised or ditched ring defining a domestic or ceremonial space, were common features of the Irish countryside for much of the early medieval period, and countless examples were removed as farmland was consolidated and improved during the nineteenth century. What makes Maddockstown quietly interesting is that its disappearance can be bracketed so precisely between two mapped moments. The 1839 survey captured it; the 1900 revision did not. The hillock itself survived, but the enclosure that once occupied its southern slope did not make it into the twentieth century in any visible form. Also present on the hillock, roughly ten metres to the north of where the enclosure stood, is a small quarry of around 45 metres in diameter, its relationship to the enclosure unclear but its proximity worth noting.

The site is not entirely lost to the eye, however. Aerial and satellite imagery has revealed the enclosure as a faint cropmark, that is, a variation in the colour or growth of grass or crops caused by buried features altering soil moisture and depth below the surface. This kind of trace is often the only evidence that survives once earthworks have been ploughed or scraped away. The enclosure at Maddockstown now exists in essentially two states: as a cartographic ghost on a Victorian map, and as a ghostly ring visible only from above, legible to a camera where it is invisible to anyone walking the field.