It was there in 1842, marked as a circular enclosure. By 1916, it was gone from the cartographic record entirely, though the earthwork itself had not disappeared so much as subsided into the landscape, flattened by time and farming until it sat just barely above the surrounding fields.

What remains is still readable to a careful eye. The site takes the form of a roughly circular area, approximately 32 metres across in both directions, enclosed by a low earthen bank. A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is a type of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, typically built between roughly 500 and 1000 AD and used as a defended homestead for a single family or small community. At Bawnmore, the enclosing bank survives to an average height of around 0.9 metres above the interior, and its base spreads to between 6 and 11 metres wide in places, suggesting the original construction was once considerably more substantial. Notably, the interior sits at a slightly higher level than the ground outside, a detail that often points to accumulated habitation deposits beneath the surface, centuries of domestic activity compressed into a gentle rise that the plough has never quite erased.