The enclosure at Rathmore North in County Limerick is that kind of site: one where the archaeology has been almost entirely reclaimed by later life, yet where enough survives in the historical record to suggest something once quite deliberate.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp noted in 1889 that near Rathmore a massive tower and rath, a rath being a roughly circular earthen enclosure used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or defended homestead, still stood east of the abbey. By 1920 the description had become more specific: a small fifteenth-century peel tower, a peel being a compact defensive tower common in late medieval Ireland and northern Britain, sat on rising ground about a mile eastward, and beside it lay a semi-circular platform over six feet high, on which a modern cottage had been built among tufted trees. The writer judged it evidently a fort, but noted it was quite defaced by its later uses. A low, straight-sided earthwork was also recorded to the south-east, near the road. What the site looked like before the cottage was built, and how much of the platform was original earthwork versus accumulated debris, remains unclear.

By the time aerial photography was being routinely collected, the enclosure had effectively vanished from view. Ordnance Survey orthophotos taken between 2005 and 2012 show no surface remains, and a Google Earth image from June 2018 confirms the same absence. The site does not appear on the OSi historic map series at all. An aerial photograph taken by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland in September 2002 forms part of the record, and may reward closer inspection for anyone researching the area. Rathmore Castle stands immediately adjacent, and its presence offers some orientation for anyone visiting the general area. The enclosure itself, however, is one of those monuments best approached through the archive rather than the landscape.