The circular enclosure recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map, and named simply 'Fort' on the Fair Plan, the working document from which the published maps were drawn, has left almost nothing behind. The ground itself offers only a faint hint: a barely discernible level area, raised slightly above the surrounding field on the downslope side, where the earthwork once stood.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were typically enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches arranged in a rough circle. They were once extraordinarily common across Ireland, numbering in the tens of thousands, but centuries of agricultural clearance have reduced many to exactly this kind of ghost. At Cappateige, even that ghost is nearly gone. The site lay roughly fifty metres east of a small stream, and whatever bank or ditch originally defined it has been levelled to the point where only the slight differential in the field's surface betrays its presence. The first edition Ordnance Survey maps, produced in the mid-nineteenth century, captured many such features before they vanished entirely, making them an invaluable record of a landscape that was already being erased.