That is rather the point of them. What makes the fort at Ardvarna quietly puzzling is that it never quite was. When Ordnance Survey fieldworkers recorded it in 1840, they noted a shape that formed nearly a triangle, with the eastern and western sides each running to about three chains, or sixty metres, and the northern side shorter at around two chains. It sat on the highest point of the surrounding flat pasture, about 350 metres west of the Killeenagarriff River, and its triangular outline was unusual enough to be worth remarking upon in the Name Books of Killeenagarriff parish.

By the time the twenty-five inch Ordnance Survey map was produced in 1897, the picture had changed further. The monument appears to have been altered into a sub-triangular form, measuring roughly thirty-six metres east to west and sixty metres north to south, which suggests that the eastern half of the enclosure was partially removed during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Agricultural improvement was a common pressure on earthworks during that period, particularly on productive flat land where a raised bank or curving boundary could simply be in the way. No external fosse, the defensive ditch that typically surrounds a ringfort, is detectable on aerial imagery from 2011 to 2018, which may reflect the extent of that nineteenth-century interference or may indicate the site never had one. What survives most clearly today is the western side of the monument, preserved as a curving field boundary, while the interior and eastern portion have been absorbed into open grassy field.

The site lies in flat agricultural land and there is no formal access or visitor infrastructure. The curving field boundary on the western side is the most legible remnant from any public vantage point. Aerial photographs, including those available through Google Earth, give the clearest sense of the monument's surviving outline and the contrast between what was recorded in 1840 and what remains. Anyone with an interest in how ordinary farming decisions reshaped the archaeological record will find this a useful, if sobering, case in point.