A rath, to use the Irish term, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, typically dating from the early medieval period and used as a farmstead or place of shelter. This one measured approximately 40 metres in diameter, a modest but not unusual size, and when archaeologists inspected it in 1984 it was still legible as a low, raised area with a partial earthen bank surviving from the south around to the northwest.

By the time that inspection record was written up, the rath was already under pressure. A road had clipped and truncated its northern arc, and subsequent development did the rest. Two houses were built across the site, one covering the eastern and southeastern portion, another sitting on the northwestern edge. What remained between them, the middle section of the original enclosure, was absorbed into a pasture field. The outline is no longer discernible on the ground. The rath effectively ceased to exist as a physical feature sometime after 1984, leaving only the map reference, the measured diameter, and the arc of surviving bank that someone noted before it was gone.

There is nothing to see at the site today, which is precisely what makes the record worth pausing over. Ringforts are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, with tens of thousands once scattered across the country, yet a significant number have been lost to exactly this kind of incremental, undramatic erasure. Kiltimagh's rath is a small example of a large pattern: a settlement feature that survived intact for perhaps a thousand years, was documented just once, and then quietly disappeared beneath gardens and grazed grass within a generation.