The ground is pasture now, apparently unbroken, with nothing to suggest that a circular earthwork some thirty metres across once occupied the high point of this field. It is, in a quiet way, the kind of place that raises more questions than it answers: not a ruin exactly, but an absence where a structure used to be.

A rath, to use the Irish term, was typically an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches arranged in a rough circle around a domestic interior. Tens of thousands of them survive across Ireland in various states of preservation, but many others have been lost to agriculture over the centuries, particularly during periods of intensive land improvement. The Curraheen example was still legible enough in 1842 to be recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which gives a reasonable sense of when it was last traceable on the ground. At that point it appeared as a circular feature roughly thirty metres in diameter. Sometime between that survey and the present, it was levelled entirely, leaving no surface trace whatsoever.