The site survives only as a cartographic ghost, a hachured circle drawn on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842, indicating a roughly circular enclosure about twenty metres across. Sometime between that survey and the present, the earthwork was levelled, absorbed into the tillage field on the north-facing slope where it had stood. No bank, no ditch, no surface feature of any kind remains.

The structure was a rath, the most common monument type in the Irish landscape. Raths are enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, typically consisting of a circular earthen bank and outer ditch surrounding a domestic settlement. At twenty metres in diameter, the Monanimy example was on the modest end of the scale, a single-family enclosure rather than one of the larger, more elaborate sites associated with higher-ranking households. The 1842 Ordnance Survey map, produced during the first systematic cartographic survey of Ireland, caught it at a moment when its outline was still legible in the ground. The hachuring, a draughtsman's shorthand for earthen scarps and slopes, tells us the banks were still visible to the surveyors walking this part of north Cork in the early nineteenth century. The levelling came later, almost certainly through repeated ploughing as the land was brought more fully into agricultural use.