That detail, the eastern end of a church breaking into the inner bank of a rath, a type of enclosed circular earthwork commonly used as a farmstead or defended settlement in early medieval Ireland, tells you something about how the site grew and changed across centuries without anyone particularly worrying about what was already there.

The remains are thought to be those of the possible parish church of Rathroe. What survives is modest: foundation walls between 1.3 and 2 metres wide and standing to around 0.4 metres in height, forming a rectangle approximately 22 metres along its long east-west axis and 7 metres across, with a gap in the southern wall towards the western end indicating an entrance. The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1839 and 1840 mark this as a church site, and by 1940 there was a recorded tradition that the ground had been used for burial, though no physical evidence of graves has been identified. The church remains themselves may be post-medieval in date, which would make them younger than the rath they occupy, reinforcing the impression of a landscape where successive generations borrowed from, and occasionally dismantled, what came before.