By the 1940s it had disappeared almost entirely from the surface, absorbed into a field in what had been Dan Kelliher's land, leaving behind only a faint curve in a field boundary as a possible trace of its eastern arc. That curving bank, measuring around twelve metres in length and standing little more than a metre and a half above the surrounding ground, is the most visible suggestion that anything was ever here at all.

A rath is the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of circular enclosure typically built between roughly 500 and 1000 AD, used as a farmstead and defended by one or more earthen banks and ditches. This particular example was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1846 as a clear circular enclosure, and was likely one of two raths noted in the 1840s along the northern side of the Nohovaldaly townland. By the time collectors working on the Schools Manuscript project documented the area in the 1940s, the site had been levelled and was no longer visible. Archaeological test trenches excavated in the early 2000s recovered what the surface had long since concealed: a bank that had originally ranged between four and six metres wide, and a fosse, the ditch that once ran outside the bank, approximately three and a half metres across and sitting about a metre beyond the bank's outer edge. The fosse would have added considerably to the defensive or enclosing effect of the original structure, even if both features had been reduced to near-nothing above ground.

What makes the Shinnagh rath quietly instructive is precisely its invisibility. The archaeology survived beneath the pasture long after the monument ceased to register in the landscape, and it took systematic excavation to confirm what the 1846 map had recorded. The curving field boundary that may echo the rath's eastern edge is the kind of detail easy to walk past without a second thought, though it carries the faint outline of a structure more than a thousand years old.