By the time fieldwork was carried out in 1987, both the mound and the plantation had been levelled entirely, leaving nothing visible on the ground. What makes this site quietly remarkable is not what survives but what was almost missed, and then lost anyway.

The story begins with the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1839, a series of detailed written accounts compiled by surveyors documenting local antiquities across Ireland. The letters for this parish recorded 'two ancient Raths in the Deer Park' as the only antiquities in the area. A rath is a circular earthen enclosure, typically dating to the early medieval period and associated with farmsteads or settlement sites. Yet when the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map was published that same year, only one such enclosure was marked. The second, described as an 'earthen mound with no stone', went unrecorded on the map and apparently slipped out of official documentation for nearly 150 years. When fieldworkers relocated it in 1987 by cross-referencing the earlier written account, it was already gone. The site sits on a slight rise forming the southern crest of a low saddle-back ridge, with a companion monument on the northern rise, and the surrounding fields are notably stony.

There is nothing for a visitor to see here now. The value of the site lies instead in what it illustrates about how the archaeological record is assembled and lost, sometimes simultaneously. A local name, 'the little rath', preserved a memory that a cartographer had once overlooked, and yet even that small continuity of knowledge could not protect the physical remains from being cleared away before anyone could examine them properly.