A ringfort that appeared as a neat circular enclosure in 1840 had, by 1897, acquired a flat northern edge, its round form trimmed into a D-shape with a straight side running approximately 26 metres across. Nobody recorded when it happened, or why. The alteration is simply there in the cartographic record, a quiet rearrangement of an ancient boundary that had likely stood unchanged for over a thousand years.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised earthen bank enclosing a roughly circular area used for farming and habitation. This particular example sits on undulating pasture in the Woodroad townland of County Limerick, south of a disused quarry, with the townland boundary of Gardenhill running approximately 30 metres to the east. The 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows it as a circular enclosure with a trigonometric station marked at its centre, recorded at 137 feet above ordnance datum. By the time the more detailed 25-inch OS map was produced in 1897, the northern side had been straightened and enclosed by a bank, giving the monument its present approximate dimensions of 28 metres east to west and 34 metres north to south. What prompted the modification is not documented. The site has been assessed from cartographic and aerial photographic sources only, compiled by Edmond O'Donovan and uploaded to the record in July 2020.

Orthophotographs taken between 2011 and 2013 show the outline of the monument still visible beneath tree cover, which means the earthworks survive to some degree despite the northern alteration. Anyone approaching the site should be prepared for working farmland and should seek landowner permission before attempting access. The tree growth that now covers the rath actually aids its identification from above, making aerial images more useful than ground-level inspection for reading its shape. The comparison between the 1840 and 1897 OS maps, both freely available through the historic mapping layers on the OSi website, remains the clearest way to trace the change that distinguishes this site from a more typical, unmodified example.