The field fences that once defined its edges are gone, the ground has been levelled, and nothing visible remains to tell a walker that they are standing somewhere that was mapped three times across nearly a century of Ordnance Survey work.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were enclosed farmsteads typically built during the early medieval period, consisting of one or more earthen banks and ditches surrounding a central living area. What made this particular example at Coollicka notable, at least while it still stood, was its scale and complexity. Writing in 1939, a researcher named Hartnett described it as a double-ramparted ringfort, meaning it had two concentric enclosing banks rather than one, and placed its diameter at around 170 feet, roughly 52 metres. Double-ramparted examples are considerably less common than single-bank ringforts and generally suggest a site of some local significance. The Ordnance Survey maps of 1842, 1904, and 1939 all recorded it as a hachured circular enclosure of approximately 40 metres in diameter, the slight discrepancy in measurements perhaps reflecting different survey methods or where exactly the outer boundary was judged to lie.

By the time the site was assessed for the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork in the 1990s, the earthworks had been levelled entirely and no surface trace remained. The three successive maps, each made a generation or more apart, now serve as the main record of something that agricultural improvement has quietly removed from the landscape.