What appears at first glance to be ordinary undulating ground resolves, on closer inspection, into something far more deliberate: the earthwork outlines of houses, the faint ridges of ancient field boundaries, the sunken traces of roads and the humped profiles of enclosures that once organised daily life here across several periods of occupation.

The site came to serious archaeological attention in the early 1940s, when Ó Ríordáin and Hunt published a substantial account in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, volume LXXII, in 1942. Their work included detailed descriptions of the monuments, aerial photography, historical references, and a report on the excavation of two house sites within the complex. O'Kelly, writing in 1942 to 1943, summarised the site as a medieval village accompanied by a wider complex of remains spanning various periods, noting its exceptional scale. Earthworks of this kind are the physical residue of settlements abandoned during or after the medieval period, sometimes as a result of plague, land consolidation, or shifts in agricultural practice, though the specific reasons for Cahirguillamore's desertion are not detailed in the available record.

The earthworks remain visible on aerial photography, and the site repays the kind of slow, attentive walking that lets your eyes adjust to the logic of old landscapes. Field boundaries and hollow ways, the sunken tracks worn by centuries of foot and animal traffic, tend to become legible only once you have spent some time moving across the ground rather than simply standing at its edge. The site sits in private farmland, so access would need to be arranged with appropriate consideration, and consulting the published Ó Ríordáin and Hunt article beforehand would give any visitor a much sharper sense of what they are looking at once they arrive.