A rath, as this type of enclosure is commonly called, would typically survive as a circular earthwork, a raised bank and ditch marking out a farmstead from the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands of them still mottle the Irish countryside. This one, however, is gone. Not ruined, not overgrown, but levelled so completely that by November 2011, aerial photography could find no trace of it whatsoever.

The absence itself is the whole story. The monument had already been categorised as levelled before aerial survey confirmed there was nothing left to see. What once may have been a low circular earthwork, the kind of enclosure that once housed a farming family of some local standing, has been erased by centuries of agricultural activity, land clearance, or simple neglect. Galmoylestown is a quiet rural townland, and whatever social or agricultural life the rath once enclosed has left no mark on the surface of the ground above it.