The earlier map shows a complete circular earthwork sitting in the north-west corner of a field; fifty years later, a field boundary cutting east to west had truncated the feature, leaving only a semicircle depicted. The landscape had been reorganised around it, and the monument had begun its slow process of becoming invisible.

A ringfort, known in Irish as a lios or rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built primarily during the early medieval period as a farmstead or settlement. This example at Gortaleen was recorded by John Curran of the Office of Public Works, who described it as a lios with a single surviving bank standing between four and five feet high, roughly 1.2 to 1.5 metres, and noted that a second enclosing circle had already been effaced. He recorded a diameter of ninety feet, close to 30 metres, which aligns with more recent measurements placing it at approximately 29 metres across. By the time Curran made his observations, the outer earthwork was already gone, absorbed into the working agricultural landscape that surrounds it. Field boundaries running north to south and east to west have since cut into what remains, parcelling the site into the geometry of later land use rather than its own original form. Aerial imagery taken in April 2020 shows the outline still faintly legible beneath scrub growth, a low smudge in the terrain that repays careful looking.