What makes this site at Ballyglass in County Galway stranger still is that one of them no longer fully exists. By 1984, development work had destroyed most of the southern rath, and a barn now occupies the western half of what was once its interior, a rather blunt ending for a monument that had already survived well over a thousand years of agricultural pressure.

A rath is a ringfort, typically a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland. At Ballyglass, there were two of them joined together, a configuration sometimes called conjoined raths. When archaeologists visited in September 1982, both were already in poor condition. Later field walls had been driven through the enclosing banks, cutting across the site from multiple directions. The northern rath was the larger of the two, measuring roughly 41 metres east to west and 33 metres north to south, and its interior contained a low earthen mound and a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically used for storage or as a place of refuge. Three small cairns to the south of the mound were assessed as probable field-clearance rubble rather than anything more significant. The southern rath, slightly smaller and more regular in shape, held a second earthen mound and a blocked souterrain at its northwestern end. Stone-facing was still visible along part of its bank at the time of survey. A third possible souterrain lies approximately 45 metres to the south of the main enclosures, suggesting the activity once associated with this place extended beyond the obvious boundaries. A preservation order was placed on the monument in 1984, the same year the southern rath was largely demolished, which lends the designation a somewhat hollow quality in retrospect.