The example in Jockeyhall townland, County Limerick, was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 as a roughly circular earthwork, the form you would expect from a rath. A rath is an early medieval farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically dating from the first millennium AD, and circular or near-circular outlines are their defining characteristic. By the time the twenty-five-inch OS map was produced in 1897, something had changed considerably: the monument appeared as an L-shaped area, enclosed by an earthen bank only along the north, east, and south-east. The western and southern portions had apparently been levelled, absorbed into ordinary agricultural use, the ancient boundary dissolving into the workaday logic of field division.

When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland visited in 2000, the picture had shifted again. Surveyors Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly recorded a slightly raised rectangular area measuring approximately 32 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south, enclosed by a bank of earth and stone along its northern and eastern sides. That bank, roughly four metres wide and standing no more than 0.6 metres above the exterior ground level, is modest but legible. To the south and west, what remains of the enclosure has been incorporated wholesale into a field boundary, its identity as a prehistoric structure largely disguised. A modern gap roughly six metres wide breaches the bank at the north-east corner. The site sits on a slight east-facing slope in gently undulating pasture, with moderate to good views in all directions, and a second enclosure lies approximately 95 metres to the north.

Orthophotographs taken between 2011 and 2013, and a Google Earth image from June 2018, confirm the earthwork is still visible as a roughly rectangular, tree-planted feature. Those trees are actually a useful navigational aid: the ring of vegetation that often marks an old rath in an otherwise open field is the most reliable thing to look for here. The site sits 115 metres north of the Ballinveala townland boundary, in what is unremarkable-looking farmland at first glance. As with many such monuments in the Irish midlands and the Munster lowlands, the most useful approach is to study a satellite image before visiting, so that the faint geometry of the surviving bank can be read against the surrounding pasture before you are standing in it.