By the time fieldwork was carried out in the 1980s, it had been levelled, cleared away during agricultural improvement of the land it once occupied.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, are the most numerous monument type in the Irish countryside, built predominantly during the early medieval period as enclosed farmsteads, their circular banks and ditches defining a domestic space for a family and their livestock. The Killeens example was recorded as sitting in pasture, and its removal is noted by Walsh in 1985 as part of a broader pattern of field clearance that affected many such sites across Cork and beyond. What makes this particular case worth pausing over is the souterrain in its interior. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with ringforts and thought to have served for storage, refuge, or both. Even after the earthwork above ground was erased, that subterranean structure remained on record, a reminder that destruction at the surface does not always mean total erasure.

There is little to see at ground level today, the earthwork itself having been lost to the plough and the cleared field. The site is a useful illustration of how much the Irish landscape has changed since the mid-nineteenth century, when surveyors still had enough to draw.