At Rathmale in County Limerick, a sub-rectangular enclosure, roughly 30 metres north to south and 40 metres east to west, once occupied flat ground near what is now a garden boundary, about 30 metres south of two houses. By the time the Ordnance Survey recorded it on the 6-inch map of 1924, it had already been bisected by a north-south field boundary, its form legible mainly through the surveyor's use of hachures, the short parallel lines cartographers use to indicate a raised platform or earthwork.

The enclosure belongs to a broad category of early Irish settlement monuments, earthen platforms or banked enclosures that typically date from the early medieval period, though without excavation it is impossible to assign a precise date or function to any individual example. What the 1924 map captured was a partial sub-rectangular platform, the greater portion lying to the east of the dividing boundary, with the western section reduced to little more than a mapped line. The record was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded to the national monuments database in February 2013. By that point the monument had been largely levelled, the raised profile of the enclosure smoothed down over decades of agricultural use until only a fragment of the western arc of the original bank remained visible.

That surviving arc extends approximately 12 metres east to west and is modest in scale, with an internal and external height of around 0.3 metres and a width of roughly 0.5 metres, barely enough to read as a deliberate earthwork to an untrained eye. The site sits on flat ground, which means there is no elevated vantage point from which to take in its overall shape, and the bisecting field boundary further complicates any attempt to visualise the original form. A visitor following the notes closely would focus attention on the western arc and the transition between what remains and what has been absorbed into the surrounding ground, a subtle exercise in reading a landscape that has largely moved on.