A rath, as these circular earthen enclosures are known, was typically built during the early medieval period as a farmstead, its banks and ditches defining a family's territory and offering modest protection for livestock. This particular one was recorded on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842, marked clearly enough to be noted in relation to the local chapel. By the time the 1916 edition of the same maps was drawn up, it had vanished from the cartographic record entirely. No earthwork, no raised ground, no depression in a field corner remains to mark where it once stood.

The gap between those two map editions covers roughly seventy years of agricultural change in Ireland, decades that included the upheaval of the Famine and the gradual consolidation and clearance of farmland that followed. Ringforts across the country were levelled during this period, their earthen banks spread across fields to improve drainage or simply removed as obstacles to more efficient tillage. The Dromkeen rath appears to have gone the same way, its fabric absorbed back into the landscape without ceremony. It was catalogued by C. Toal in the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, where it appears as entry number 566, already described as leaving no surface trace.