No bank, no ditch, no raised ground announces itself to anyone walking the field today. The only evidence that something once stood here is a broken line on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, tracing an oval shape roughly eighteen metres across its longest axis and twelve metres across its shortest, just large enough to have sheltered a small farmstead or a modest defended homestead of the kind common across early medieval Ireland.

The broken line notation used by nineteenth-century OS surveyors typically indicated a feature that was already degraded or ambiguous at the time of mapping, meaning this enclosure was fading even as it was first being formally recorded. Small enclosures of this type were often ringforts or their humbler relatives, earthen or stone boundaries encircling a family's living space and livestock, features so numerous across the Irish countryside that thousands have been lost entirely to centuries of ploughing, grazing, and land improvement. At Loughlea, whatever once defined that oval outline has since been absorbed completely into the surrounding pasture, leaving the 1842 map as a kind of fossil, preserving the outline of something the ground itself no longer remembers.