That it survives at all is notable; that it has been pressed into service as a manure store, its floor churned by heavy machinery, gives it a particularly unsentimental afterlife.

The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish landscape. These enclosures, typically dating from the early medieval period roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, were farmsteads rather than forts in the military sense, the earthen bank marking out a defended homestead for a farming family and their livestock. Thousands once dotted the countryside; a great many have been levelled by agriculture over the centuries. This one at Rathcobane, with its roughly thirty-metre diameter and a surviving bank running from the south-west around to the south-east, has not been levelled, but the interior has taken a different kind of punishment. The compaction and disturbance from farm use will have compromised whatever archaeological deposits once lay beneath the surface, making any future understanding of how the site was used in its original life considerably harder to recover.