The ground shows nothing: no bank, no ditch, no raised outline to catch the light on a low winter afternoon. What we know of it comes almost entirely from a cartographer's mark on the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which recorded a circular enclosure roughly twenty-three metres in diameter before the land gave up its last visible traces.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths or lios depending on the region, were enclosed farmsteads typically dating from the early medieval period, between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. Most consisted of an earthen bank and outer ditch encircling a family's dwelling and perhaps some livestock. They are among the most common field monuments in Ireland, with tens of thousands once dotting the landscape, and yet a significant number have been lost entirely to agriculture, drainage, and the slow settling of earthworks back into the soil. The Cloonmorris example, modest in size, appears to have followed that pattern completely. By the time anyone thought to formally document it beyond the cartographic record, the surface evidence had gone.