A rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, once occupied this ground. By the early 1980s it was gone, levelled between 1981 and 1982, leaving only a subtle unevenness in the grass where the banks once stood.

What makes the site quietly interesting is the paper trail it left behind. The Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1842, recording it as a circular enclosure at a time when such features were still commonplace across the Irish countryside. Raths were constructed largely between the sixth and tenth centuries, serving as enclosed homesteads for farming families, their banks and ditches marking out domestic and agricultural space rather than purely defensive ground. Tens of thousands once existed across Ireland; many have since been lost to agriculture, development, or simple neglect. The Killeen example followed that pattern, surviving long enough to be recorded on the first systematic national map, and then disappearing within living memory.