Roughly half the circuit has been quarried away, leaving only the northern arc of an enclosure that once measured somewhere between thirty and forty metres across. The missing portion, from the north-east around through south to south-west, was removed for stone and the excavated material heaped around the edges, so the wound left by the quarrying is itself still visible in the landscape. The remaining section, overgrown with trees and pitted by animal burrows, sits on a natural rise that falls away gently to the south.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common settlement type in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead within a raised circular bank and an outer ditch called a fosse. The Coolmore example follows this pattern closely: the surviving bank is earth and stone, round-topped, roughly 6.6 metres wide, and rises about 1.25 metres on its outer face. The fosse beside it is round-bottomed, nearly 1.9 metres wide and just over a metre deep. These are modest but legible dimensions. What makes the site quietly melancholy is the precision with which its destruction can be dated. The quarrying that consumed the greater part of the monument is marked on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1903 to 1904, meaning the damage was well underway, if not already complete, by the turn of the twentieth century. The upcast material still heaped around the quarry edge is a kind of inadvertent record of what was taken.