By 1840, when the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in careful detail, it had already been left off entirely, presumably because there was so little left worth recording. What survives instead is a ghost on an earlier map, a curving, almost horseshoe-shaped outline roughly fifty metres along its longer axis, drawn into a report on Shannon navigation from 1837. Whether that shape accurately reflects what was ever built there is openly uncertain.

The structure's origins appear to go back to 1608, when a pier was formed at the spot later referred to as Lord Clare's Pier. By the time Captain Manby was compiling his report for the commissioners overseeing improvements to Shannon navigation, that original pier had, in his words, gone to decay. Manby nonetheless recommended extending a small pier from the same location, which suggests the site itself was still considered worth using, even if the masonry was not. The position was a curious choice, though. According to the 1837 map, a vessel anchored there would have had only limited shelter from the north-east, while remaining fully exposed to the south-east, where Atlantic weather funnelling up the estuary could do considerable damage. Samuel Lewis, writing in the same year in his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, noted Manby's recommendation, preserving one of the few references to the pier in print. Whether any extension was ever built following that advice is not recorded.

Carrigaholt itself is a small village, and the castle nearby is a well-preserved tower house that dates from the late fifteenth century. The pier site at Rinemackaderrig sits close to the beach, roughly seventy metres offshore in terms of the original structure's relationship to the shoreline. There is little on the ground to guide a visitor toward anything specific, and the historical record is thin enough that the pier may leave no visible trace at all. Its interest lies less in what can be seen than in the particular kind of documentary half-life it occupies, recorded once, omitted once, and not much discussed since.