But this particular hillock near Gartlandstown was deliberately shaped, its natural contours cut back and scarped to produce a roughly circular platform approximately twenty-three metres across from north to south and twenty-four metres from east to west. There is no surviving bank, which sets it apart from the classic raised-ringfort profile most people picture when they think of early medieval enclosures. What remains is the scarp itself, the ground dropping away at the edges, with faint traces of a fosse, a defensive ditch, still legible from the south-west. A ringfort is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and used as a residence and livestock enclosure. Here, the bank has gone entirely, leaving only the cut of the hillside and the ghost of the ditch.

The site sits in open grassland with the land to the south poorly drained and now covered by forestry plantation, while wider views open out to the north, east, and south from the elevated position. A second ringfort lies roughly two hundred metres to the east, suggesting this stretch of Westmeath landscape once carried a small cluster of enclosed settlements. At the southern edge of the scarped platform there are vague suggestions of a ramped entrance about three metres wide, though the evidence is subtle rather than definitive. The outline of the monument became clearly visible in aerial photography taken in November 2011, which is often how these low and abraded earthworks reveal themselves, the raking light and seasonal vegetation of late autumn doing what ground-level inspection cannot.