The one at Lough in County Kilkenny departs from that template in a quietly telling way: its eastern bank has been levelled, leaving the enclosure as a semi-circle rather than a complete ring. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1839, suggests the reason, marking what appears to be quarrying activity along that eastern edge. Whether the material was taken for road surfacing, field drainage, or building, the result is a monument that survives only partially, its missing arc now occupied by farmland.

What remains is still coherent and reasonably well preserved. The interior measures roughly 26 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west, enclosed along the surviving northern, western, and southern arc by a low earthen bank. Externally, this bank stands to around 2.4 metres, giving a sense of the original scale even if the interior height is now only a few centimetres in places. Outside the main bank runs a fosse, the shallow ditch that was a standard feature of rath construction, here between one and 1.5 metres deep and up to four metres wide, with a further outer bank beyond it. A ringfort with this kind of double-bank-and-fosse arrangement, sometimes called a bivallate rath, would generally have signalled a household of some standing in the early medieval period. The site sits on the western side of a slight north-south ridge, with the ground dropping away steeply to the east, which would have made the levelled eastern bank all the more useful as a quarry source while also providing the original occupants with a natural defensive advantage.

Four field boundaries converge on the monument from the four cardinal directions, a pattern that suggests the rath has been used as a convenient corner-post for agricultural division over many centuries. Good views extend in all directions from the ridge, which may partly explain why the site was chosen in the first place.