The landowner has said that the rath was levelled decades ago, and the landscape now offers only the faintest trace of what was once a substantial enclosure. Yet the very absence is interesting, because the earlier maps tell a different story.

A rath is a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish countryside, typically consisting of a circular earthen bank and ditch enclosing a farmstead from the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. At Dromhale, the 1846 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the site as a circular enclosure roughly fifty metres in diameter. By the time the 1939 OS map was produced, the feature had shrunk or eroded to a raised circular area of around forty metres, already being skirted by a field boundary running south-east to north-north-west. That boundary is now the most legible remnant of the original bank, a low earthwork one metre wide and sitting just over a metre high internally, though barely twenty centimetres above ground on its outer face. Parts of it are thought to incorporate material dumped from the demolished bank itself, meaning the rubble of the monument has been folded into the field boundary that replaced it. Inside the boundary, the ground is uneven, and a low rise is still visible along the north-east arc where the bank once ran. Badger sets, rabbit burrows, and trees have colonised the same line, drawn, as animals often are, to disturbed and softer ground.