That combination of obliteration and residual trace makes it quietly instructive about how much of the Irish landscape has been reorganised out of existence within living memory.

A rath is a type of ringfort, typically an enclosed circular farmstead of the early medieval period, defined by one or more earthen banks and, often, an outer ditch called a fosse. The Lisnamoyle example sat on a gentle south-facing slope and measured roughly 28 metres across east to west, enclosed by a substantial earthen bank standing between two and two and a half metres high when inspected in 1984. Unusually, no fosse was detected at that time. The site does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838 but is marked on the 1915 edition as a hachured circular enclosure, suggesting it was either overlooked or considered unremarkable by the earlier surveyors. The 1984 inspection also found no physical evidence of a use that local tradition had apparently attached to the place: the rath was associated with the burial of unbaptised children, a practice historically linked to ringforts and other liminal ground across Ireland, where such infants were interred outside consecrated churchyards. No graves were identified during that visit. By the late 1980s or early 1990s, the bank had been levelled as part of land reclamation works, and when the site was revisited in 2000, only the most ephemeral outline of the former bank could still be traced, running from the north-west to the north-east and again at the south-east and south, where the old earthwork merges indistinguishably with a natural break in the slope.