On a north-north-east facing slope of a ridge in Monkstown, County Westmeath, what was once a ringfort, an enclosed circular settlement of the early medieval period typically defined by one or more earthen banks and an external ditch, was levelled sometime in the mid-1960s. The ridge still commands good views to the north-west and north, the kind of vantage point that would have made the site attractive to whoever chose to build there in the first place.

When the Ordnance Survey produced its Fair Plan map in 1837, the feature was recorded clearly as a circular earthwork annotated simply as "fort". That designation reflected a landscape still readable in its original form. What the levelling of the 1960s left behind is a raised circular area roughly thirty metres across on its north-south axis and twenty-six metres east to west, bounded by a scarp, with faint traces of a fosse, the external ditch that would once have reinforced the enclosing bank, surviving at the south and south-south-west. Running across the monument at a diagonal, north-east to south-west, are traces of cultivation ridges, the corrugated remnants of lazy-bed or ridge-and-furrow farming that post-date the ringfort's use but are now themselves part of the site's layered biography.