It sits on a rise in undulating pasture, with open views south-west towards Macgillycuddy's Reeks, yet at ground level there is nothing to indicate it was ever there. The earthwork has been gone for decades, levelled sometime in the 1960s according to local memory, leaving the land smooth and unremarkable. What makes the site quietly strange is precisely this absence: a place recorded, surveyed, and catalogued that exists now only in maps and recollection.

A rath is a type of early medieval enclosure, typically a circular area of raised ground defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or place of habitation. The Gortagullane example was a modest one, a single bank enclosing a circular flat area of roughly twenty metres in diameter. It appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map surveyed in 1893 to 1894, marked as a circular enclosure, which means it survived intact into at least the late nineteenth century and likely well into the twentieth. The decision to level it in the 1960s would not have been unusual for the period; land improvement schemes across Ireland during those decades removed a significant number of earthworks, particularly smaller raths regarded as obstacles to efficient farming.