A ringfort, to give the term its due, is a circular enclosure, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or settlement during the early medieval period. This one, on a small natural rise at Piercefield, was still clearly enough defined in the nineteenth century to be marked on Ordnance Survey mapping, first as a roughly circular earthwork annotated as a 'fort' on the 1837 OS Fair Plan map, and again on the six-inch edition of that same year. By the time the revised twenty-five-inch map was produced in 1911, it had vanished from the cartographic record entirely.

The site was positioned on the western side of a road that marks the boundary with the neighbouring townland of Grangegeeth, suggesting the enclosure may have been deliberately set against that boundary line. Whatever its original relationship to the surrounding landscape, it was probably levelled sometime in the seventy-four years between those two surveys. It did not survive alone in its original setting: within a few hundred metres sit a moated site to the north-east, a second ringfort just thirty metres to the south-east, and Piercefield Castle to the north-west, making this corner of Westmeath unusually dense with layered occupation. The Piercefield ringfort, however, is the one that did not make it. A dwelling house and garden now occupy the site, confirmed by aerial photography from November 2011, and nothing is visible at ground level.