A faint curve of earth, roughly 23 metres across, is all that survives of what was once a complete circular enclosure sitting on a gentle rise above a river valley in north Tipperary. A ringfort, or rath, was a type of enclosed farmstead common throughout early medieval Ireland, its bank and ditch defining both the boundary of a family's land and a degree of protection for their household and livestock. At Gorteenavalla, even that modest outline is now reduced to a suggestion.

The site was still intact enough to be recorded clearly on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, where it appears as a full circular enclosure. By the time the revised edition was published in 1902, the southern half had already been removed and replaced with field boundaries. Subsequent agricultural improvement finished the job: both the remaining earthworks and those later field divisions to the south and south-west have since been levelled. The river that once ran some 20 metres to the south-west of the site, flowing roughly east to west through the valley below, would have made this a practical location for an early settlement, offering water at a short distance while the slight elevation gave a measure of visibility across the surrounding ground.

For anyone who seeks it out, there is little to reward the eye beyond that barely perceptible low bank curving through the pasture. But that trace is precisely what makes sites like this quietly instructive. In the space of sixty years between two Ordnance Survey editions, something that had endured for perhaps a thousand years was half-erased, and within another century it was nearly gone entirely.