The ground had been cleared, the field boundaries rearranged, and whatever earthwork had once defined the place was gone. Almost nothing, that is, except for the view from a ridge to the south, where a circular cropmark still traced the outline of the original enclosure through the tillage soil, a ghostly diagram of something that no longer physically existed. That a ringfort could survive only as a colour difference in growing crops is a peculiar kind of persistence.

The site appears on the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a neat circular enclosure, the standard form for a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was a type of enclosed farmstead typically dating from the early medieval period. By the 1922 edition, the outline had already become more irregular, and a field boundary had been absorbed into the structure from the north-east around to the south, suggesting incremental agricultural pressure over the intervening decades. The site measured approximately thirty metres north to south and twenty-five metres east to west. When inspectors visited in September 1982, no surface trace survived at all. The landowner, however, had his own account of what had been there. He described a mound and an L-shaped souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval settlements and used variously for storage or refuge, which he had filled in himself at some point before the visit.