Standing in the undulating pasture on the rise where it is supposed to lie, there is nothing to catch the eye, no earthen bank, no visible ditch, no obvious break in the grass. The site exists, for most practical purposes, only on paper.

A rath is an early medieval enclosure, typically circular, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and used as a farmstead or place of habitation, most commonly between roughly 500 and 1000 AD. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, but this one in Lauragh has fared poorly against time and, most likely, agricultural activity. Its existence is recorded because the 1846 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the most detailed cartographic exercises ever carried out in nineteenth-century Ireland, showed a circular enclosure approximately twenty metres in diameter at this location. That surveying work, done in the decades before much of the Irish landscape was transformed by famine and its aftermath, captured earthworks that have since been levelled or obscured beyond recognition at ground level.