Walk the west-facing slope of hilly pastureland where it was recorded and you will find, at most, slight irregularities in the ground surface, the kind of gentle undulations that could be anything or nothing. The fort is there, or rather the ghost of it is there, legible only from the air.

A rath, as ringforts of this type are sometimes called, was typically a circular or oval earthen enclosure used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, its banks and ditches defining a boundary around a dwelling and its associated livestock. The Knockdrummore example was recorded as an oval enclosure measuring approximately 35 metres east-northeast to west-southwest and around 25 metres on the perpendicular axis, details captured on the 1920 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map. By the time anyone went to look at it on the ground, in May 1983, the earthworks had effectively vanished. Field boundaries had clipped the monument along its northern and eastern sectors over the years, and whatever remained had been reduced to those faint surface irregularities. What saved it from complete obscurity was aerial photography. The outline of the enclosure is still visible on digital satellite imagery, the buried or compressed remains retaining just enough contrast with the surrounding soil and grass to betray their presence to a camera overhead.