A rath, as these circular earthwork enclosures are known, would originally have served as a farmstead, its raised banks and ditches marking out a defended living space. The one at Glendine was roughly thirty metres across, a modest but clearly deliberate structure set on the brow of a steep hill, its entrance facing south and approached from level ground at the summit.

The enclosure was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed between 1839 and 1840, where it appears as a distinct circular feature. By the time the revised edition was produced in 1945 and 1946, it had already disappeared from the cartographic record, suggesting significant disturbance in the intervening century. A survey carried out in 1981 by Doyle found part of the rath still present but already reduced, noting that a section had been removed. The remainder sat on that prominent hilltop, its southern entrance still oriented toward the open approach. The subsequent spread of suburban Kilkenny did the rest. A bungalow constructed in 1999 appears to occupy the north-eastern quadrant of what was once the enclosure, with whatever survives of the earthwork now largely enclosed within private garden ground. The north-western edge may extend a little further, crossing into the garden of a neighbouring property.

The trajectory of this site, from mapped monument to absorbed suburb in little over a century and a half, is not unusual across Ireland, but it is rarely quite so legible. The 1839 map, the 1981 fieldwork, the 1999 planning permission, each stage can be traced, and together they describe how an early medieval landscape feature becomes, incrementally and almost imperceptibly, just someone's back garden.