Stand in the pasture beside the Inny River and the ground gives nothing away, no earthen bank, no hollow, no trace of the circular enclosure that once defined this place. The monument has effectively vanished at ground level, absorbed into the working landscape around it.

What remains is largely a matter of record and, more recently, of light. The Ordnance Survey 25-inch map, produced in the late nineteenth century, recorded a semi-circular curving earthwork defined by a scarp running from east, around through south, to west, suggesting that even then the feature was partially compromised. A ringfort, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a circular enclosure typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1000 AD, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and used as a farmstead or place of shelter. The example at Lackanwood sits on a slight rise in pastureland, 140 metres east of the Inny River, with bog lying 75 metres to the south, a topographical setting that would have made good sense to an early medieval farmer seeking defensible, well-drained ground near water. A modern farmyard and outbuildings have since been constructed against the western side of the monument, which accounts for much of what has been lost. The clearest evidence of what lies beneath came from an aerial photograph taken in November 2011, in which a cropmark reveals the outline of a circular enclosure approximately 45 metres in diameter. Cropmarks of this kind appear when buried features affect how vegetation grows above them, showing up as tonal differences in dry conditions, offering a view of the past that the surface refuses to give.