A rath, to use the Irish term, is a circular earthwork enclosure, typically built during the early medieval period as a farmstead surrounded by an earthen bank and ditch. This one was recorded on the Ordnance Survey map of 1842, which means Victorian-era surveyors could still make it out clearly enough to commit it to paper. Today, no surface trace can be seen at all.

What the 1842 map captured was a circular enclosure, already slightly compromised even then by a fieldbank cutting into its southern side. That kind of agricultural encroachment is a familiar story across Ireland, where centuries of land division, drainage, and ploughing have quietly erased thousands of such sites. The rath at Ballinclemesig followed that trajectory to its conclusion. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, recorded it as entry number 447, noting its position east of another nearby site. By that point it was already a place defined by absence, surviving only because someone had once drawn a circle on a map.