When investigators visited the site in 1972, what had once been a circular earthen enclosure had been recently spread across the ground, reduced to a disturbed area of earth and stone. The kind of structure that had survived for well over a thousand years had been levelled, probably within living memory of that visit.

Ringforts, roughly circular enclosures defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. At Culleenabohoge, the site sits at the base of a north-facing slope of a steep hill, in ground that would have offered some natural shelter. Its existence before destruction is confirmed by the 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map, which depicts a circular enclosure at this location and labels it plainly as a fort, the standard shorthand used by nineteenth-century surveyors when they encountered these earthworks. A second possible ringfort lies approximately 90 metres to the north, suggesting this part of the hillside may once have supported a cluster of related early medieval activity.

What makes the Culleenabohoge site particularly interesting now is how it continues to register despite having no visible presence on the ground. A Digital Globe aerial photograph taken in November 2011 captured a faint crop mark at the location, the subtle difference in plant growth that occurs above buried or disturbed archaeology. The outline of the enclosure, erased at ground level decades earlier, was still legible from above, written faintly into the soil itself.