The rath at Friarstown North offers none of that. By the early 1940s it had already been levelled so thoroughly that a surveyor could barely make it out, and a Land Commission fence had been driven straight across what remained. What survives today is not a monument so much as a ghost of one, readable only from the air.

When O'Kelly recorded the site in 1942 to 1943, the assessment was blunt: it was only just possible to trace the fort, it had been levelled flat, and it appeared to have had no fosse, the encircling ditch that typically defines a rath of this type. A rath, or ringfort, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks, built during the early medieval period and used primarily as a farmstead or family compound. They are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, with tens of thousands recorded across the country, which perhaps explains why the one at Friarstown North attracted so little protective attention. Its overall diameter was recorded as 105 feet, or around 32 metres, placing it at the smaller end of the scale. The Land Commission fence mentioned by O'Kelly was part of the broader twentieth-century reorganisation of Irish agricultural land, a process that reshaped field patterns across the country and, incidentally, did considerable damage to many low-lying earthworks that lacked legal protection.

For anyone curious enough to seek the site out, the most useful tool is a screen rather than a pair of boots. Digital Globe aerial photographs reveal the outline of a circular-shaped field, with farm buildings visible to the north, and that circular boundary is really all that remains of the enclosure's original form. On the ground, without that aerial perspective, there is little to orient a visitor. The surrounding townland name, Friarstown, hints at a medieval ecclesiastical presence in the area, though nothing in the recorded notes connects the rath directly to that history. It is, in the end, a site that rewards the kind of attention usually given to maps and archives rather than to the field itself.