In 1842, the six-inch OS map recorded a circular enclosure roughly fifty metres across at Templemary in North Cork, planted with trees and drawn with the hachured shading that cartographers used to indicate raised earthworks. By 1937, the same map series showed something noticeably smaller, around twenty metres across, enclosed by a fosse. A fosse is simply a ditch, typically cut around the outer edge of an earthwork to reinforce the boundary. Today, even that reduced outline has been largely levelled.

What survives on the ground is a roughly circular area, measuring about 32.5 metres north to south and 31 metres northeast to southwest, enclosed by a low rise in the pasture. A shallow external fosse runs from the northwest around to the east-northeast, and a second low rise continues from north to east-southeast. The interior lifts gently toward its centre, which is a common feature of raths, the class of enclosed farmsteads built in early medieval Ireland, typically between the sixth and tenth centuries. These were not fortresses in any military sense but enclosed homesteads, the banks and ditches marking out the domestic space of a farming family and their livestock. The trees that once marked this one on the Victorian map are gone, and the earthworks themselves have been reduced by centuries of agricultural use, leaving only the faint geometry of the original enclosure readable in the slope of the ground.