No earthwork, no ditch, no raised bank remains visible today; the site has been levelled so thoroughly that a visitor standing there would have no reason to suspect anything was ever built on the spot.

A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, a form of defended farmstead used widely in early medieval Ireland. The one at Cnoc na hAbha was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map with the symbol for a large mound, and the Fair Plan, an earlier manuscript precursor to the published OS sheets, named it simply as "Fort". The clearest evidence of its form came much later: an aerial photograph taken in 1949 by the Ministry of Defence (reference V. 158/110) showed it as a univallate enclosure, meaning a single-ringed structure, still faintly legible from the air even after whatever damage it had already suffered on the ground. By the time J. Cuppage documented the Dingle Peninsula in the 1986 archaeological survey of Corca Dhuibhne, no visible trace remained. The site sits on level ground, which may have made it especially vulnerable to agricultural clearance, since the earthworks of raths on flat terrain tend to be shallower and easier to remove than those on hillsides where natural topography reinforces them.

What makes Cnoc na hAbha quietly instructive is the sequence of evidence itself: manuscript plan, printed map, aerial photograph, and finally silence. Each layer caught the monument at a different stage of its disappearance, and together they sketch the outline of something that the landscape no longer remembers on its own.