By November 2011, aerial photography showed no trace of it whatsoever, levelled at some point after a field report was made in 1973. The speed with which these things can disappear is quietly unsettling.

Ringforts, also known as raths, are roughly circular enclosures defined by an earthen bank and an outer ditch called a fosse; they were the typical farmstead of early medieval Ireland, and thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. The Mabestown example was never in good condition. When it was examined, it measured approximately fifteen metres north to south and sixteen metres east to west, a modest sub-circular enclosure sitting on a steep slope of rising ground. Even then, the fosse was only discernible on the southern and western sides, and quarrying had already eaten into the southern portion and much of the interior. Cultivation ridges running northeast to southwest were still faintly visible across the interior, a detail suggesting the land inside had been turned over for farming at some stage, a common enough fate for these monuments once their original function was long forgotten. A second ringfort sits roughly 490 metres to the southwest, a reminder that such sites were once far more densely scattered across the landscape than what survives today. The Mabestown rath, caught between quarrying and agricultural pressure, simply did not last.