No wall, no bank, no hollow in the earth gives any indication that anything was ever here. The site survives only in the documentary record and on paper maps, which is itself a kind of quiet archaeological tragedy.

A cashel is a ringfort defined by stone walls rather than earthen banks, and this one was substantial enough to leave an impression on at least one researcher. When the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was drawn up in 1933, the enclosure was recorded as roughly circular, with a diameter of around 35 metres. McCaffrey, writing in 1952, classified it as a stone fort and described a semicircular drystone wall with a surviving length of approximately 23.3 metres at that time. Within two decades of that description, land reclamation appears to have removed whatever remained. Also associated with the site is a possible souterrain, a souterrain being an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically built in the early medieval period for storage or as a place of refuge, which adds at least a suggestion of the site's original complexity, even if nothing of it is now visible either.

There is nothing to see at Coldwood today, and that is precisely what makes it worth knowing about. The landscape has been tidied into productivity, the walls cleared away, the ground levelled. What the maps of 1933 recorded, and what McCaffrey was still able to partially describe in 1952, has since been absorbed entirely into the field system around it.