Within a year or two of that image being made, the earthwork was levelled, probably in the course of agricultural improvement. The timing gives the photograph an accidental quality, a last record of something that had persisted on this steep south-west-facing slope for well over a thousand years before being erased in a single season of machinery.

Ringforts, also known as raths, are roughly circular enclosures defined by earthen banks and ditches, built throughout Ireland from the early medieval period and typically associated with farmsteads of some status. This one at Grangebarry was a bivallate example, meaning it had two concentric circuits of bank and fosse rather than one, which generally indicates a site of greater importance or defence. At its fullest extent, as recorded on both the first-edition Ordnance Survey map of 1840 and the revised edition of 1903 to 1904, it measured around 31.2 metres north to south. Its outer bank was some four metres wide, the inner bank stretched to 12.2 metres in width, and the fosse between them reached roughly 66 centimetres in depth. Killanin and Duignan noted its bivallate character in their 1967 survey of Irish monuments. What is particularly striking is how precisely documented the structure was before its destruction, and how little that documentation managed to prevent it.

The earthworks have not entirely vanished. Low traces of the banks and fosses survive across the south-west, west, and northern arc of the site, and the inner bank remains legible in most quadrants except the east, where a farm road now runs along the outer edge. A post-and-wire fence cuts across the northern side. The monument also sits in notable company: a concentric enclosure lies immediately to its south-west, and another ringfort immediately to its north-east, suggesting that this particular slope in Grangebarry was once a focus of early medieval settlement rather than an isolated farmstead.