By 1971 it had been described as a levelled monument, and a subsequent report confirmed the situation plainly: the site has been levelled and no surface features remain. What was once a circular earthwork enclosure, roughly 35 metres north to south and 32 metres east to west, has effectively been absorbed back into the surrounding pasture. Only the faintest trace of its outline survives, and even that is visible only on aerial photography, where the eye has to work to find it.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a roughly circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They served as farmsteads for families of varying social standing, and thousands once dotted the landscape. The Kilgawny example was still legible enough in 1837 to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a distinct circular enclosure, and on the OS Fair Plan of the same year it appeared as an oval form delimited by two concentric lines, annotated simply as a fort. A pond called Pollmore lay about 25 metres to the north. By the latter half of the twentieth century, however, agricultural activity had erased whatever earthworks remained above ground. The hillock itself survives, set among other low hummocks and gently undulating pasture, with open views to the south-east, and the landscape context still gives some sense of why this particular spot might once have been chosen for settlement.