What makes this particular example in Derrygullinaun quietly arresting is not what remains but what has been methodically erased. A straight field fence cuts across what was once a complete circular enclosure, and everything to the north of that line has been levelled so thoroughly that only the faint curve of a later field boundary betrays where the outer bank once ran.

Ordnance Survey maps chart the disappearance in stages. The 1838 six-inch map shows the rath as a substantial circular enclosure with both an inner ring and an outer ring. By the time the more detailed twenty-five-inch plan was drawn, surveyors could still record a subcircular embanked enclosure roughly twenty metres across, set within two outer banks and an intervening fosse, a ditch designed to reinforce the defences. But on the 1930 six-inch map, the rath appears as a D-shape with only one external bank, the northern third already gone. Today the surviving portion is a slightly raised semicircle, about twenty-three metres east to west and fifteen metres north to south, with an earthen inner bank still standing to just over a metre on its outer face, and a single outer bank reduced in places to a low scarp whose drop is amplified by the natural fall of the north-south ridge on which the rath sits. There is no longer any trace of the fosse or second outer bank that once completed the circuit.

The interior is now effectively inaccessible, ringed densely with hazel, hawthorn, and brambles that have grown into an almost impenetrable thicket. The rath occupies the top of a ridge with a steep drop to the east and a gentler slope to the west, and from the surrounding pasture the views extend across undulating terrain and wide expanses of bog in both directions, a landscape that gives some sense of why this elevated position was chosen in the first place.