That quiet disappearance from the cartographic record is itself a small mystery: within a few decades, a monument visible enough to be formally annotated had been overlooked, or perhaps so degraded as to seem unremarkable to the surveyors who passed through.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is a type of enclosed settlement that was in widespread use across Ireland from the early medieval period, typically consisting of one or more earthen or stone banks encircling a domestic space. The Davidstown example is modest in scale. The 1837 map records an oval earthwork measuring roughly 25 metres on its northwest to southeast axis and 19 metres across. By 1970, when someone took the time to describe it on the ground, the shape had shifted in the telling: a small, roughly triangular platform of earth and stone, enclosed by a slight earthen bank on two sides and a stone-faced scarp on another, the whole thing smothered in thorn trees and briars. That kind of dense, tangled growth is common on old earthworks, partly because the disturbed, slightly elevated ground suits scrub vegetation, and partly because the land has been left alone long enough for it to take hold. The site sits with streams to its southwest and northwest, the latter stream marking the townland boundary with Calliaghstown, and a related ringfort with an associated souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber often used for storage or refuge, lies about 250 metres to the southwest. The clustering of two such monuments in close proximity suggests this corner of Westmeath was more actively settled in the early medieval period than its current, quietly agricultural appearance might suggest.