At Sandfordscourt in County Kilkenny, a rath once occupied the brow of a small but steep-sided hill, positioned with evident deliberateness to command rolling grassland in every direction. A rath is an earthen ringfort, typically a circular enclosure bounded by one or more banks and ditches, and this one used the natural topography shrewdly: on three of its four sides, the ground fell sharply away from the embankment itself, making the earthwork all the more formidable.

Doyle, writing in 1981, recorded its dimensions with some precision: roughly twenty-seven metres from the entrance on the south-east to the far side, and about twenty-five and a half metres across. That entrance placement, facing south-east, is fairly typical of Irish ringforts, a pattern that may reflect both practical and cultural preferences in early medieval Ireland. By the time anyone thought to check again, however, the monument had been levelled entirely. By 1987, no visible trace remained at ground level. Whatever machinery or agricultural pressure brought it down, the process was thorough enough to erase what had likely stood for over a thousand years.

The hill itself presumably remains, steep-sided as described, with its wide views intact. But the rath that gave the spot its particular significance is gone, surviving now only in a brief written account and a set of measurements taken just a few years before it disappeared.