The rath at Rathcoola in County Cork occupied a commanding position in open pasture, its circular, saucer-shaped platform measuring roughly 42 metres across and defined by a shallow fosse, an encircling ditch, with an external bank rising to about 2.4 metres. For much of its circumference, that outer bank had a low, field-fence quality to it, the kind of feature that can easily be mistaken for an agricultural boundary by anyone not looking closely. In 1984, the monument was levelled, erasing much of what centuries of landscape use had left standing.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised circular area surrounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as farmsteads by families of varying social rank. Before the levelling, the Rathcoola example retained enough of its form to be meaningfully described. Writing in 1939, P. J. Hartnett noted that the entrance had faced east, a common orientation in Irish ringforts, and that this could still be detected by a dip in the inner bank at that point, even though the bank itself had already been substantially levelled by then. What Hartnett observed as a surviving clue in 1939 was gone entirely within fifty years, the landscape rearranged around a structure that had endured since at least the early medieval period.