On a south-facing slope in grassland, a degraded scarp curves from the south-southeast through south to west-northwest, which is more or less all that remains of what was once a circular earthwork enclosure. The interior, rather than being worn away gradually by time and weather, appears to have been quarried out, removed deliberately for building stone or road material, leaving a hollow where a farmstead once stood.

Ringforts, or raths, are the most common archaeological field monuments in Ireland. They are the enclosed homesteads of early medieval farming families, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and external ditches, and they number in the tens of thousands across the country. The one at Pollnamal was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a circular enclosure roughly 35 metres in diameter, clipped at the west and northeast by a field bank. By the time the third edition was produced in 1932, the enclosure appeared larger on paper, roughly 45 metres across, though by then it was already being absorbed into the surrounding field system, with boundaries cutting across its western and northern sides. Whether the apparent growth in size reflects more careful measurement or simply a different cartographic moment is difficult to say. What is clear is that between the first mapping and the twentieth century, the site was losing ground, literally, to the working landscape around it.