No earthworks, no visible trace of ditches or ramparts, and certainly no suggestion that one of the more consequential military encampments in Irish history once occupied this ground. That absence is itself the point. The camp at Rathmore was one of three principal fortified positions held by Crown forces during the Siege and Battle of Kinsale in 1601, and its disappearance, gradual at first and then accelerated by modern development, has left a significant episode of history with almost no physical presence in the landscape.

The encampment was held by the Earl of Thomond, and it was actually his second position during the siege. He had initially dug in further west, on the Ardmartin ridge at a height called Liscahane More. In early December 1601, Lord Deputy Mountjoy resolved to tighten the Crown's encirclement of the town, and Thomond's forces were ordered to move. As the contemporary account by Fynes Moryson records, the lesser camp on the west side was to "rise and sit down farther off, towards the South-gate." The new position, on the west side of the Innishannon road, is identifiable partly because the camp appears in a contemporary painting of the battle, now held at Trinity College Dublin, which shows it in relation to a nearby enclosure. In 1940, a researcher named O'Neill located what he described as a slight hollow running east to west in a field just south of Annmount, which he took to be a remnant of the camp's layout. By the time a licensed metal detection survey was carried out in 2006, even that hollow had gone. The survey recovered three pieces of lead shot designed for a caliver, a light firearm common in the late sixteenth century, from rough ground beside the nineteenth-century Annmount House. Three fragments of ammunition are all that the surface has yielded.

A residential development has since removed a large portion of what remained above ground, though it is considered likely that sub-surface traces of ditches, ramparts, and internal structures survive beneath the crest and slopes of the ridge. The camp sits within a landscape that determined the outcome of a confrontation whose consequences, the defeat of the Gaelic lords and their Spanish allies, reshaped the political and cultural order of Ireland. The ground holds that history quietly, and almost entirely out of sight.