Where a circular earthen enclosure once stood, roughly 35 metres across, the ground has been levelled flat. The ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a bank and ditch surrounding a dwelling, has been absorbed back into the agricultural landscape. What survives, possibly, is a section of field fence running along the northern edge of the site, standing about 1.8 metres high. Whether that earthen boundary is a remnant of the original bank or simply a later field division is the kind of question the land no longer answers clearly.

The site appears on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a distinct circular enclosure, which means that at the time of the survey it was still legible in the landscape, at least from a cartographic perspective. In the decades that followed, it was levelled, joining the large and mostly unacknowledged category of Irish ringforts that have been lost to agriculture, land improvement, and the gradual pressure of working the ground. Thousands of such sites were recorded across the country before they disappeared, and the 1842 OS maps remain one of the primary ways of locating what was once there. Mellifontstown sits in County Cork, in a part of the island where early medieval settlement was dense, and where the earthworks of enclosed farmsteads were once a common feature of the countryside.