The rath at Garrynamona sits on a fairly steep south-east-facing slope below the summit of a hill in County Tipperary, in an area of rocky outcrops, and for most visitors there would be little to see at all. The northern half of the enclosure has been erased entirely, and even the surviving southern portion survives only as the faintest of impressions in the ground.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically comprising a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead and enclosure for livestock. This one was clearly visible as a circular enclosure on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1843, and again on the mid-twentieth-century revision surveyed between 1952 and 1953. By the time an aerial photograph was taken in 1973, however, only the southern half was legible from the air, the northern portion already lost behind the east-west field boundary that cuts across it. Ground inspection of what remained revealed a bank roughly 3.6 metres wide, standing just 0.77 metres above the interior surface and barely 0.1 metres above the exterior ground level, along with the faint suggestion of an outer fosse, a shallow external ditch approximately 3.5 metres wide and 0.7 metres deep. The southern arc of the enclosure measured roughly 20.3 metres north to south as far as the field wall, and about 25 metres across east to west.

What makes the site quietly instructive is precisely how little is left, and how much of that little can still be read if you know what to look for. The interplay between the 1843 map, the aerial photograph, and the ground survey traces a slow process of erasure, one field boundary at a time.