Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, are roughly circular enclosures defined by earthen banks and ditches, built predominantly during the early medieval period as farmstead enclosures for families of some local standing. Thousands survive across Ireland, but a significant number have been quietly erased, and this is one of them.

The fort at Gortmolire had already suffered considerable damage by the time Bowman recorded it in 1934, describing a levelled single-ramparted fort of around 41 yards in diameter on the land of a T. Colman, with only a small remnant of the rampart still serving as a field boundary. A century earlier, the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map had shown a hachured circular enclosure of approximately 22 metres across, its outline still legible enough to be carefully marked by the surveyors. By 1936, the OS map captured something more ambiguous, a kink in a field fence slightly to the south-east, a trace of the original structure bent into the practical geometry of agricultural land. That fence too is gone. According to local recollection, the field boundary was levelled around 1974, leaving no surface trace whatsoever. The field itself, however, preserves a memory of what stood there: its Irish name, Páirc a Leasa, translates roughly as the field of the fort or enclosure, a habit of place-naming that frequently outlasts the physical remains it describes.