Not a great earthwork, not a conspicuous landmark, but a modest rise of dark earth that was quietly demolished around 1820 to make way, or perhaps to make room, for a forge. By the time anyone thought to record what had been lost, the mound itself existed only in local memory and a few lines of clerical scholarship.

The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, was the one who caught it before it slipped entirely from the record. In the fourth volume of his history of the diocese of Ossory, he turned his attention to Killossory, a subdivision of the townland of Rathduff, situated roughly a mile south of Kells where the road crosses the stream dividing Rathduff from Stonecarty. Carrigan was trying to locate the lost church of Killossory, and he offered two possible sites. One was a small green field to the west of the road, beside the ford, where dark soil of the kind typically associated with ancient burial grounds had been turned up, along with old horseshoes. The other candidate was the ford itself, where the forge then stood on the site of that demolished mound, which Carrigan noted was composed largely of the same black, graveyard earth. He could not be certain which location held the church, and neither can anyone today. The first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1839 does show a building immediately to the north-east of the ford, gone by the time the 25-inch survey was carried out in 1899; that building was presumably the forge Carrigan described, though the map does not name it. Modern satellite imagery shows no trace of any earthwork at the location where the mound has since been plotted.

What remains, then, is essentially a gap in the landscape: a place where something once stood, was taken apart for practical purposes, and left behind only dark soil, a vague outline on an old map, and the carefully hedged speculation of a nineteenth-century historian trying to reconstruct a medieval parish from whatever fragments he could find.