What had been a recognisable, if poorly preserved, early medieval enclosure in 1984 was, by 2001, half-buried beneath a new house and bisected by a driveway. A rath, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a ringfort of the type common across Ireland from roughly the early centuries AD into the early medieval period, typically a circular or subcircular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches and used as a farmstead or place of habitation. That a rath should be built upon is not especially rare, but the pace of the change at Cornamucklagh, and the completeness of it, gives this particular site a quietly uncomfortable quality.

When surveyors visited in November 1984, the rath sat on a gentle south-south-east-facing slope, measuring roughly 39 metres on its WSW to ENE axis and 33 metres from NW to SE. Its enclosing elements were already in poor condition: a low stony bank, no more than a metre high on the exterior and barely 30 centimetres above the interior ground level, ran from the south-south-east to the north-west, overgrown with trees. Beyond that, only a low narrow bank and a scarp half a metre high completed the circuit. Traces of an external fosse, the shallow ditch typically dug just outside the enclosing bank, could be made out from a change in vegetation at the south-east and from a shallow depression at the north. The interior itself was unobstructed and sloped gently towards the south-east. By the time of a follow-up visit in October 2001, the bank had been levelled, a house occupied the southern sector of the site, and a driveway cut straight across the former interior from north-north-east to south-south-west.