There is nothing to see. Or almost nothing: a slight hollow in a pasture field, the kind of gentle dip that a person could walk across without a second thought. Beneath that unremarkable surface, and visible only when viewed from the air, lies the ghost of a rath, a type of circular earthwork enclosure built during the early medieval period, typically as a farmstead or place of status, and one of the most common monument types in the Irish landscape. This one has been entirely levelled, its banks and ditches erased, leaving only the faint imprint of its circular outline preserved in the soil.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, produced in Ireland from the 1830s onwards, recorded the site as a circular enclosure roughly fifty metres in diameter, set within a mixed tree plantation known as Long Nursery. The plantation itself is now gone, or at least no longer defines the spot in any obvious way, and the surrounding land rolls in the undulating fashion typical of this part of Galway. What the old maps caught, and what aerial photography has since confirmed, is that the rath once existed here in clear enough form to be mapped and named. The aerial image from the OSi Digitalglobe survey shows its outline as a cropmark or soilmark, the kind of faint circular trace that buried archaeology leaves in the growth patterns of grass and crops when seen from above, the land remembering what the eye at ground level cannot.