What survives is not earthwork or stone but a mark on a map, the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch series, where a draughtsman recorded a circular enclosure roughly forty metres in diameter. Today, the surrounding land is level pasture and nothing visible betrays what once stood here.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when they were earthen-banked enclosures, were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. Thousands were built across the country between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries, and many thousands have since been reduced or erased entirely by centuries of agriculture. The Gortroe example appears to have followed that trajectory. By the time the site was examined, no surface trace remained, leaving the 1838 map as the primary evidence that an enclosure ever existed at this location. That survey, conducted in the decades following the establishment of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, captured a landscape still carrying features that subsequent generations of ploughing and drainage would remove.