The low rise in pasture at Turreen once held a circular enclosure of the kind commonly called a ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement that proliferated across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically consisting of an earthen bank and ditch enclosing a farmstead or homestead. By the time anyone thought to formally record what had stood there, the monument itself was already gone.

The story of its disappearance is legible in two editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map. In 1837, the site was marked as a circular enclosure and labelled simply "Fort", suggesting it was still recognisable as an earthwork at that point, or at least that the cartographers had enough evidence to depict its shape. By the 1883 revised edition, the designation had changed to "Site of", a quiet cartographic admission that the monument no longer existed in any meaningful physical sense. In the intervening decades, a house was built within the enclosure and a garden laid out around it. The archaeology was levelled, the interior built upon, and the ringfort passed from landscape feature to map footnote.