The enclosure here has been levelled so thoroughly that only the faintest swelling in the ground, roughly 35 to 40 metres across, hints that anything once stood at all. Yet the early Ordnance Survey map of 1837 recorded it clearly as a circular embanked enclosure, a ring of raised earthwork that would have been a legible feature in the landscape. By the 1919 edition the depiction had changed: a penannular hachured enclosure, meaning a near-complete ring open to the south-west, roughly 35 metres across in both directions. Between those two surveys and the present day, whatever remained was flattened entirely.

What makes this particular absence more interesting is the company it kept. A rath, the familiar form of an early medieval ringfort typically used as a defended farmstead, sits on the ridge roughly 60 metres to the south, and a second rath occupies the eastern end of that same ridge about 160 metres to the south-east. A church and graveyard lie only 100 metres to the west. Two further enclosures cluster to the north-east and north-north-east, within 250 metres. This is not an isolated site but part of a dense knot of early features, suggesting a landscape that was once considerably more organised and inhabited than the quiet pasture visible today. The name Rathscanlan itself carries the word rath, pointing to a longer memory of these earthworks even when the earthworks themselves are gone.