A ringfort, for those unfamiliar, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, used throughout early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or defended homestead. This one, on the demesne lands of Mount Murray House, was still tree-lined and clearly visible when the first Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1837, marked on the OS Fair Plan as a circular earthwork annotated simply as a "fort". By 1972, when surveyors visited, the field had been ploughed flat. What remained was a faint circular shadow in the soil, roughly 29 metres across, with traces of a shallow fosse, the surrounding ditch, still just discernible to the southeast and northwest. Scattered across the interior were burnt stone, bone, and teeth, the quiet residue of domestic life from perhaps a thousand years earlier.

The site sits immediately west of the old carriage avenue leading to Mount Murray House, with the gate lodge lying about 115 metres to the north. Lough Owel, one of the larger lakes in Westmeath, is visible to the southeast, just 320 metres away. The positioning is telling: early ringfort builders consistently chose elevated ground near water, and this slight natural rise in the undulating landscape would have made the enclosure visible across the surrounding fields, even if it now leaves no mark above the grass. What the plough erased from the surface, aerial photography has partially recovered. A Digital Globe image taken in November 2011 shows the fort as a crop mark, the differential growth of vegetation above the disturbed subsoil tracing the outline of the vanished ditch with unexpected clarity.