Unlike the earthen raths that still rise visibly from Irish fields, this one survives only as a ghost, an almost imperceptible circular rise of about twenty-four metres across, its outline traced by a scarp and the faintest remnant of an external fosse, a shallow surrounding ditch, now only legible on the western side. For most of the year, and from ground level, there is little to see at all.

What confirmed the site's presence was not fieldwork but aerial photography. A Digital Globe image taken in November 2011 captured the monument as an extremely faint crop mark, the kind of subtle discolouration in vegetation that betrays buried or levelled features below the surface. Crop marks form when soil disturbance from ancient construction affects how plants grow above it, causing slight differences in colour or height that become readable from the air, particularly in dry conditions or certain seasons. The ringfort, or rath, is a monument type common across early medieval Ireland, typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or high-status residence. This example in Kilmaglish has been so thoroughly levelled that it belongs to a category of sites known mainly through such remote-sensing techniques. A second ringfort lies approximately 150 metres to the south-south-east, suggesting this hillside once carried more activity than the bare grassland now implies.