What was once a complete circular enclosure, a rath or ringfort of the kind that Irish farmers built throughout the early medieval period as enclosed farmsteads and homesteads, has been reduced to a semi-circular arc sitting just 1.3 metres above the surrounding ground. The southern half is gone, cut through by a field boundary running east to west, and the circle that once measured around 20 metres across internally will never be whole again.

The site's paper trail is itself a small story of erasure. The enclosure appears clearly on the Ordnance Survey map of 1842, faithfully recorded during that ambitious mid-nineteenth century effort to document the Irish landscape in detail. Yet by the time the revised edition was produced in 1916, it had vanished from the map entirely, presumably because so little of it remained visible by then that the surveyors either missed it or judged it unworthy of inclusion. The northern arc of raised ground survived, but the fieldbank that bisected the southern sector had by that point done its quiet damage, absorbing the earthwork into the working agricultural landscape around it. Ringforts, which number in the tens of thousands across Ireland, were frequently dismantled or built over as farming practices changed, and this one in Bawnmore is a fairly typical example of that gradual disappearance.