What remains is subtle enough that it took aerial photography to reveal the full scale of it: an earthwork complex spreading across roughly twelve hectares, the kind of extent that suggests not a single farmstead but an organised settlement, now reduced to low ridges and hollows in the grass.

The site itself centres on an artificially modified platform, shaped and levelled by human hands, and enclosed by an internal fosse (a defensive or boundary ditch cut into the earth) along with a well-preserved L-shaped earthen bank running from west through south to east, measuring approximately sixty metres in length. A gap in the bank at the southern side may mark where an entrance once stood. Just outside the bank to the northwest sits a low rectangular earthwork, roughly twelve metres north to south and four metres east to west, with some stone still visible at the surface. This forms the southern edge of the wider earthwork complex identified from aerial imagery taken in November 2011. The site does not stand alone in the landscape: a Franciscan religious house lies approximately 140 metres to the northwest, and a ringfort sits around 230 metres to the southeast, placing this deserted settlement within a layered medieval environment where different kinds of habitation and institution once coexisted in close proximity. Running northeast from the eastern side of the Franciscan house is what appears to be a sunken way or perhaps an old river course, a further trace of how this landscape was once organised and used. Taken together, the features at Kilmacahill suggest a medieval community that was once substantial enough to leave its shape on twelve hectares of Westmeath ground, even if the reasons for its abandonment remain unrecorded.