Nothing of it remains visible at ground level today, which makes the cartographic evidence all the more striking. On the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, the site was carefully marked with hachures, the fine radiating lines surveyors used to indicate a raised circular platform roughly thirty metres in diameter. The mapmakers saw something that has since disappeared entirely from the surface of the land.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of enclosed farmstead in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from around the sixth to the tenth century. They generally consisted of a raised circular area defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, enclosing a family's dwelling and outbuildings. The Ardcahan example, at approximately thirty metres across, falls within the smaller end of the typical size range. How and when the earthworks were levelled is not recorded. Agricultural improvement over the centuries, particularly deep ploughing and land drainage, has erased thousands of such sites across Ireland, leaving only the occasional documentary or cartographic trace to confirm they ever existed.