No earthwork rises from the ground, no bank or ditch catches the eye; the site exists, for the casual observer, only as an absence. This is not especially unusual for ringforts as a class, many of which have been levelled by centuries of ploughing and land clearance, but it gives this particular monument an oddly abstract quality, a place defined almost entirely by what cartographers once drew rather than anything a visitor might now encounter.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the typical enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, generally consisting of a circular bank and ditch surrounding a homestead, and they survive in many thousands across the country. The Cloontamore example sits on the south-eastern slope of a low ridge, a position that would have offered its original occupants reasonable drainage and some degree of natural elevation. It appears as a circular enclosure on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1837 and 1883, which means that by the mid-nineteenth century the feature was still legible enough from the air or at ground level to be recorded by surveyors, even if only just. The fact that it had disappeared entirely from the visible landscape by the time modern fieldwork was carried out suggests the intervening decades were not kind to it, most likely through continued agricultural activity on what is, after all, a gently sloping and workable piece of ground.