A circular earthwork enclosure, one of a cluster of ringforts spread across farmland in County Kilkenny, it was not abandoned or forgotten in the ordinary way. It was dug up and spread on fields as fertiliser.

Ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, were once extremely common across the Irish landscape. The enclosures at Dunbell Big formed a loose constellation, spaced roughly 122 metres apart, a short distance from a larger earthwork described by the antiquary J. A. Prim as 'the great rath'. By the 1840s, the pressures of agricultural improvement had caught up with them. One was levelled and ploughed without any investigation. A second was partially trenched in May 1842, its fill, described as 'a rich black clay largely impregnated with organic remains', carted off to enrich the surrounding soil. The third, the enclosure recorded by Prim as 'B' on his 1872-3 map, was subjected to the same treatment, and it was during this work that an extraordinary range of material came to light. The inner ditch and the central mound yielded bones in thick layers, the remains of deer, oxen, horses, swine, calves, and domestic fowl. Alongside these were eight or ten small circular pits, each packed with charcoal, burned stones, and charred bone, some evidently used for cooking, others appearing to have functioned as small forges for working iron. The finds retrieved included portions of nine rotary querns used for grinding grain, hone stones, bone pins, beads, a comb, bronze and iron fibulae, an iron axe-head, knife blades, a chisel, a reaping-hook, a horseshoe, a small square iron bell, and a few fragments of coarse glazed pottery, the only pottery Prim ever recorded from any of the Dunbell raths. By the time he wrote again on the subject in the mid-1850s, no further ceramic finds had turned up anywhere across the site.

Nothing of this enclosure now remains above ground. The monument was subsequently quarried out entirely, as were two of the other nearby enclosures. The landscape that contained this dense cluster of early medieval activity has been almost completely erased, first by improvement, then by industry, leaving Prim's meticulous published accounts as the only record of what was once there.