The ground gives nothing away; there is no bank, no ditch, no earthwork of any kind visible to a person walking across the field today. What survives is a mark on a map, specifically the Ordnance Survey six-inch sheet produced in 1842, where a hachured circular enclosure, roughly 25 metres in diameter, was carefully recorded before it disappeared entirely.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common settlement type in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They served as farmsteads and were built and occupied mainly between the sixth and tenth centuries. The one at Inchinapallas was modest in scale, its roughly 25-metre diameter placing it at the smaller end of the range. By the time the first large-scale Ordnance Survey mapping programme reached this part of north Cork in the early nineteenth century, the fort was still recognisable enough to be recorded with hachures, the cartographic shorthand used to indicate raised earthworks. At some point between that survey and the present, it was levelled, most likely through agricultural clearance, leaving the gentle south-west-facing slope it once occupied as ordinary grazing land.