No earthwork rises above the grass, no bank catches the light at a low angle, no ditch interrupts the field. The site exists now largely as a cartographic fact, an oval outline pressed into the 1846 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, measuring roughly 35 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west.

A rath is an early medieval enclosure, typically circular or oval, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and used as a farmstead or place of settlement in early Irish society. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of repair, but Cockhill Fort, as this one was known locally, was already losing its shape by the time the Ordnance Survey teams passed through in the 1840s. Their field notes record it as a small rath, described as "nearly defaced", lying approximately five chains, roughly 100 metres, to the north-east of Cockhill Cottage in the townland then associated with the parish of Kilcummin. The name Cockhill Fort attached to the site at that period suggests it retained at least some local recognition, even as the earthworks themselves were fading back into the slope. Whatever combination of ploughing, grazing, and time brought it to this condition, the process was well advanced before anyone thought to write it down.