What is actually there, once you look more carefully, is the opposite: a steep-sided, flat-bottomed depression roughly thirteen and a half metres by fifteen, sunk nearly a metre and a half into the ground. Whether the misreading was a cartographic assumption or a trick of light and contour on the 1903 to 1904 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the result is a small puzzle at the heart of an otherwise methodically constructed enclosure.

The ringfort at Coolmore is bivallate, meaning it was defended not by a single encircling bank and ditch but by two concentric rings of earthworks. The interior is roughly fifty metres across, enclosed first by an inner bank up to 7.2 metres wide and then by a fosse, a defensive ditch, before a second outer bank and a further outer fosse complete the arrangement. This double-circuit design suggests the site was considered worth a considerable investment of labour, possibly indicating it was home to a family or household of some local standing during the early medieval period, when ringforts were the dominant form of enclosed settlement across Ireland. The entrance appears to have been in the south-west quadrant, where the inner bank is reduced and a slight causeway carries a path across the fosse. Elsewhere, later agricultural activity has left its marks: part of the outer bank in the southern quadrant has been cut away and the hollow turned into a pond, and a large boulder sitting in the eastern section of the outer fosse is almost certainly the result of field clearance rather than anything more deliberate. About two hundred metres to the north-west sits a separate moated site, a type of rectangular, water-ringed enclosure more commonly associated with Anglo-Norman settlers, making this corner of Coolmore an unusually concentrated patch of medieval activity set among rough pasture on gently rolling ground.