The earthwork is gone, the banks levelled, and nothing breaks the surface to suggest that anything was ever there. What remains is the record of its former existence, caught in maps and aerial photography, the archaeological equivalent of a shadow after the object has moved on.

A rath, as this type of monument is known, was a roughly circular enclosure bounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used throughout early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or defended homestead. This particular example was still visible, at least in outline, when the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1841 to 1842, and it appeared again on the 1916 revision of those maps, suggesting it survived more or less intact into the early twentieth century. By 1974, when the Geological Survey of Ireland carried out an aerial photography programme, the banks had been levelled, but the enclosure left a faint imprint on the ground in the form of a crop mark, a phenomenon where buried features influence the growth of whatever is planted above them, producing subtle variations in colour and height that are invisible at ground level but legible from the air. That crop mark is now the primary evidence that the site ever existed, documented by C. Toal in the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995.