What was once large enough to be mapped clearly on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch sheets in 1837, shown as a substantial subcircular enclosure with trees planted along its perimeter, had by the late twentieth century been reduced to something only an attentive eye could follow across the grass.

A rath is an early medieval earthwork enclosure, typically circular or oval, formed by one or more banks and ditches, and used as a defended farmstead or high-status residence. The Cartron example, roughly 45 metres in diameter according to a 1976 report, was already levelled by that point, though its outline could still be traced on the ground, ghosting the perimeter of whatever original earthwork had stood there. By 1914, when the Ordnance Survey revised its mapping, the tree planting visible in the 1837 edition had gone, and the enclosure appeared simply as a rough circle. The suggestion is that the rath was at some point deliberately landscaped, its banks reduced and incorporated into the surrounding agricultural land in the manner common across Ireland from the eighteenth century onwards, when improving landlords and working farmers alike removed earthworks that stood in the way of more productive use of the soil.

Further levelling after 1976 has since removed even the faint surface trace that earlier observers recorded. Nothing is now visible at ground level. The site survives in the documentary record and in the slight elevation of a low rise in pasture, but the monument itself has been absorbed entirely into the field.