No bank, no ditch, no earthwork of any kind survives above ground. What makes the site quietly compelling is precisely this absence, the fact that it is known only because somebody, at some point in the nineteenth century, drew a circle on a map.

A rath is a type of ringfort, an enclosed farmstead typically built during the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They were constructed by enclosing a circular area with an earthen bank and external ditch, and served as the homesteads of farming families. The Currafarry example appeared on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which was surveyed in the mid-nineteenth century, recorded there as a circular enclosure approximately forty metres in diameter. At that time, a ring of trees still marked the site, growing around the enclosing element from the south-west, through the north, and around to the east, the vegetation following the arc of what had once been a substantial earthwork. Those trees, or at least the pattern they formed, were enough to make the feature legible to a surveyor's eye. By the time the site was assessed for the archaeological inventory of north Galway, that legibility had gone entirely.