By the time anyone went looking carefully, it had essentially ceased to exist above ground. When inspected in October 1983, the enclosing wall had been levelled entirely, and only a scattering of loose stones in and around the interior hinted that anything had ever stood there at all. The hawthorn had moved in and made itself at home.

A cashel, as this type of site is classified, is a ringfort whose enclosing boundary was built from stone rather than earth and bank. They are a familiar feature of the west of Ireland landscape, where surface stone is plentiful and earthen ramparts less practical. In their heyday, roughly the early medieval period, they functioned as enclosed farmsteads, the stone wall marking territory and offering a degree of protection for a household and its animals. The Pollnagroagh example had been noted on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps as a circular enclosure, which is often the only surviving documentation for sites that have since been reduced by agricultural clearance or the gradual reuse of dressed stone for field walls and buildings. Cody's survey of the area, published in 1989, recorded its dimensions and confirmed what the inspection had found: the wall was gone, the interior overgrown, the place present only as a faint archaeological address.