The site appeared on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps in 1842, 1903, and 1938, each time rendered as a hachured ring, a cartographic shorthand for a raised, roughly circular enclosure. At some point after those surveys, it was levelled, and mounds of displaced material were dumped across what had been the interior. What the maps recorded so consistently has since been reduced to a subtle disturbance in the landscape.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead with one or more earthen banks and ditches. The Bunkilla example appears to have been a relatively modest but well-defined specimen. Writing in 1939, P. J. Hartnett recorded that a single rampart and outer fosse, the fosse being the defensive ditch dug outside the bank, still survived at that time, along with what he described as indications of an outer bank at the north. He measured the diameter at 145 feet, and noted that the entrance faced to the north-east, a common orientation for ringforts, likely chosen to catch morning light and face away from prevailing winds. That description captures a site still legible in the field, if only just.

The gap between Hartnett's account and the current condition of the site is where much of the interest lies. Three separate OS surveys across nearly a century recorded no change; then, at some point in the twentieth century, the earthworks were demolished and the material scattered. What was once a measurable, mappable enclosure with a discernible entrance and surviving banks is now a landscape of dumped spoil in a grazing field.