No record explains exactly when it happened or who ordered it, but by the time the revised 25-inch Ordnance Survey maps were printed in 1897, the monument was simply gone, ploughed or graded into the surrounding pasture without ceremony. What makes this site peculiar is that the fort refused to disappear entirely. Its outline keeps reappearing, seasonally and stubbornly, as a cropmark in the grass.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, was a roughly circular enclosed farmstead, typically dating from the early medieval period in Ireland, between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. They were defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and served as a defended homestead for a farming family rather than a military fortification in any grand sense. The example at Harding Grove was recorded in 1840 by the Ordnance Survey as one of two ancient forts in the townland, described in the field notebooks covering the Abbeyfeale to Bruree area. At that point it appeared on the 6-inch map as an oval-shaped platform defined by a scarp, with a field boundary running along its southern edge and a building standing about 35 metres to the south-south-east. Harding Grove House itself lies roughly 300 metres to the south-west. Sometime in the following decades, the earthworks were levelled, most likely during agricultural improvement, and the monument drops off the cartographic record entirely. What survived was the buried difference in soil composition and moisture, enough to show up as an oval cropmark measuring approximately 30 metres north-west to south-east and 27 metres north-east to south-west, visible on aerial photographs taken in October 2002 and on satellite imagery from as recently as September 2020.

The site sits in pasture, just 16 metres east of the N20, which makes its general location easy enough to place on a map, though access to the field itself would require landowner permission. There is a related enclosure recorded about 172 metres to the north-east, suggesting the immediate area retains a degree of archaeological density beneath its unremarkable surface. Cropmarks of this kind are easiest to spot in dry summers, when differential moisture retention in buried ditches causes the grass or crop above to grow and colour differently from the surrounding ground. On foot and at ground level, there is nothing visible to see; the fort exists now almost entirely in the aerial record, a ghost of a monument best appreciated from above.