Yet within living memory, this was a recognisable earthwork, a rath or ringfort of the kind that once numbered in the tens of thousands across Ireland, serving as enclosed farmsteads for early medieval families between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. This particular example was D-shaped rather than the more typical circular form, measuring approximately 27 metres east to west, with a notably straight western side running some 40 metres in length. Local knowledge described it as a fort defined by a raised bank, a fosse (that is, a ditch running alongside the bank), and possibly a second outer bank beyond that, suggesting a more substantial enclosure than the simplest examples of the type.

The 1945 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map still recorded the earthwork clearly enough to capture its unusual geometry, and a stone wall that enclosed the monument survived into more recent times. That wall was eventually taken down, its material repurposed to construct an outhouse to the north of the site. Then, in the 1960s, during land reclamation work, the monument itself was levelled. It was not a dramatic or deliberate act of erasure so much as a practical one, the kind of quiet removal that reshaped the Irish countryside throughout that decade as agricultural improvement schemes encouraged the clearance of old earthworks, hedgerows, and anything else that interrupted the working of machinery across a field. A second possible rath survives some 80 metres to the south-west, which at least preserves a sense of how this area may once have been organised, two enclosed settlements in proximity, perhaps connected by kinship or landholding arrangements that are now entirely beyond reconstruction.