What makes this particular rath quietly puzzling is not its shape or its earthworks but the label assigned to it by nineteenth-century mapmakers. When the Ordnance Survey recorded the site in 1841 to 1842, they marked it not as a fort or a rath but as an "Old burial ground". By 1914, a second edition of the map returned to the same spot and noted it again, this time as "burial ground (disused)". The structure, then, carried a memory of the dead rather than of defended settlement, at least in the minds of those who mapped it.

A rath is an early medieval ringfort, typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks, used as a farmstead or high-status residence from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century. This one in Kilcolman is a fairly substantial example. Its interior measures approximately 42 metres north to south and 38 metres east to west, with the enclosing bank adding several metres on each side. That bank is between 3 and 4.6 metres wide at its base and stands around a metre high on the exterior. A slight fosse, the shallow ditch that typically runs outside the bank and from which the earth was originally dug, survives along the northern to western arc, measuring roughly a metre wide and 0.4 metres deep. The association with burial, recorded consistently across two map editions spanning more than seventy years, suggests the site held some local significance beyond its original agricultural or residential function, though precisely when or why it came to be remembered that way is not recorded.