That discovery was not, in the end, surprising, though it came too late to save the monument. By that point, the earthwork on the ridge at Baunmore had already been steadily dismantled for decades, its stone fed into a lime kiln that stood just twenty metres or so to its south. A lime kiln is a simple but voracious structure, used to burn limestone into quicklime for fertiliser and mortar, and it consumed the rath piece by piece across much of the nineteenth century. What the bones confirmed was a long-suspected truth: this was not merely a rath in the ordinary sense.

A rath is a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically of early medieval date, most often interpreted as a farmstead. This one, however, sat on the crest of a north-south ridge in the townland of Bayswell and carried a different weight of history. It was recorded in 1839 as Raith Chuil Gad, meaning, in the Ordnance Survey Letters compiled that year, the Rath of the Angle or Recess of the Gads. The same source described an elliptical form divided internally by a trench and mound, with the faint foundation of a small square stone building visible at its southern end. Writing in 1905, the historian Carrigan proposed that the site was probably an ancient Church of Rath, a place of Christian worship that had functioned for many centuries before being superseded by a new Church of Rath around 1300. The proximity of a medieval church and graveyard roughly fifty metres to the north lends that interpretation a quiet plausibility. The bones, the internal building foundations, the ridge-top position overlooking lower ground to east and west: each detail fits a site that was sacred long before anyone thought to quarry it.