The ringfort that once occupied a prominent hillock in the area's undulating grassland has been so thoroughly levelled that nothing remains above ground. No earthen bank, no ditch, no trace. What confirms it ever existed at all is a faint crop mark picked up in a Digital Globe aerial photograph taken in November 2011, the kind of ghostly outline that appears when differential moisture or soil disturbance causes crops to grow at slightly different rates over a buried feature.

The site's paper trail stretches back to 1837, when it was recorded on the Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map as an oval shaped enclosure, annotated simply as 'fort'. Ringforts, roughly circular or oval enclosures typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, were a widespread form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, most commonly associated with farming families of some local standing. The Gartlandstown example sat on a hillock, a position that would have offered good visibility across the surrounding ground. It was not alone in the landscape: another ringfort lies around 400 metres to the north-west, and an earthwork of some kind sits roughly 250 metres to the south-south-west, suggesting this was once a fairly well-settled stretch of countryside. At some point between the mid-nineteenth century and the present, the monument was levelled entirely, likely through agricultural clearance.

There is little for a visitor to see on the ground today, which is rather the point. The hillock is still there, rising gently out of the grassland, but the enclosure it once carried survives only as a smudge on an aerial image.