No earthen banks rise from the ground, no ditches interrupt the grass, and nothing obvious signals that this unremarkable field was once, in all likelihood, a settled enclosure of early medieval Ireland. The site at Coolies survives mainly as a cartographic ghost, visible on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1894 to 1895 as a circular enclosure roughly twenty metres in diameter, but effectively erased at ground level by the time anyone thought to look closely.

A rath, to use the Irish term, was typically a farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and thousands of them survive across the Irish landscape in varying states of preservation. This one did not fare well. Local information points to field clearance and land consolidation carried out in the mid-1990s as the likely cause of its disappearance above ground. That kind of agricultural reorganisation, common across rural Ireland during the latter decades of the twentieth century, has accounted for the destruction or severe degradation of many such sites. A large pile of stones lying to the north-east of the area may be the residue of old field boundaries disturbed during that work. What makes the site at Coolies more than a simple case of erasure is the associated souterrain, a type of underground passage or chamber built in stone and typically used in early medieval Ireland for storage or, occasionally, refuge. The souterrain, recorded separately, suggests the rath was once a functioning settlement rather than a minor enclosure of uncertain purpose.