It appeared on no Ordnance Survey map, matched no recorded monument, and left almost no trace on the ground. The only clue that something had once been there was a slight, unexplained curve in an otherwise ordinary field boundary, visible on maps from 1839 and again on the 1948 revision, but easy to overlook and impossible to interpret without something more to go on.

The something more came from the historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, who described the district of Killossory as lying about a mile south of Kells, where the road to Knocktopher crosses the small stream dividing Rathduff from the neighbouring townland of Stonecarty. In attempting to locate a long-lost church associated with Killossory, Carrigan offered several possible sites, one of which he placed within what he called the old "raw", his rendering of the Irish word rath, a type of circular earthen enclosure common across Ireland from the early medieval period, typically defined by a bank and ditch and used as a farmstead or settlement. His candidate site lay about 100 metres east of the local ford. That rath, however, could not be confirmed from any map source, and the reference sat unverified for generations. What eventually resolved the question was satellite imagery. Aerial photographs taken in 2004 to 2006 and again in 2008 and 2021 revealed a clear cropmark, the faint but legible signature left in growing crops when soil disturbance lies beneath the surface, outlining a circular enclosure roughly 48 metres in diameter and defined by a fosse, or ditch. The western edge of this enclosure corresponds precisely to that curious curvilinear kink in the old field boundary, a boundary that has since been removed entirely from the landscape.