The rath at Curraghboy in County Westmeath sits on a slight natural rise amid gently undulating pasture, surrounded by wet hollows, and commanding good views in every direction; all of which describes exactly the kind of position an early medieval farming family would have chosen when enclosing their homestead with an earthen bank. Ringforts, known as raths when defined by earthworks, were the standard settlement form across Ireland roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and tens of thousands once dotted the landscape. This one, however, has been so thoroughly reduced that it no longer registers on satellite photography at all.

The monument's slow disappearance is legible through a sequence of historical maps. The 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as a D-shaped enclosure, with a straight side running along the north-east. By the time the revised twenty-five-inch edition was published in 1913, it had already shifted in character, appearing as a roughly C-shaped area, approximately 33 metres north-west to south-east and 23 metres north-east to south-west, defined only partially by a scarp. A scarp, in earthwork terms, is the surviving edge or face of a bank after the upper material has been lost or spread. By 1971, when the site was formally described, even that partial outline was struggling. The enclosing bank had been reduced to a low, steep scarp along the south-west to north-west arc and had been levelled entirely along the northern and eastern sides. Burrows and scrub had disturbed what remained, any original entrance was no longer identifiable, and no external fosse, the ditch that would typically have accompanied the bank, was visible. The interior and its enclosing elements were largely hidden beneath vegetation.