Walk the ground today and there is nothing to indicate it is there at all, no earthwork, no ring of stones, no depression in the grass. Its existence is known almost entirely because someone recorded it on a map nearly two centuries ago.

The first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map, surveyed around 1840, captured the outline of a circular enclosure at this location with the kind of careful draughtsmanship that has since become one of the most valuable archaeological tools in Ireland. Such enclosures, when they survive visibly, are often the remains of a rath or ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built predominantly in the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and once among the most common monument types across the Irish landscape. The Curragharneen example has since vanished from the surface entirely, most likely levelled by agricultural activity in the intervening generations between that 1840 survey and the present day. What the cartographers recorded, and what has not returned, is now the only testimony to whatever structure once defined that hillside.