In the four decades between those two map editions, whatever had remained of a once-functioning rath had diminished enough to warrant the prefix that surveyors reserved for things essentially gone. A rath, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, typically dating from the early medieval period and used as a farmstead or place of habitation. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation; many thousands more exist only as crop marks or fading outlines in the landscape.

The Carrickcreeny example had an original internal diameter of approximately 22.5 metres, which places it at the modest end of the scale but well within the typical range for a single-family enclosure. A field boundary running northeast to southwest now bisects the site into two roughly equal portions. To the northwest of that division, the ground has been levelled entirely; to the southeast, the space has been absorbed into a small field. A low bank of earth and stone still traces what is presumed to be the original perimeter, though it so closely resembles the ordinary field boundaries nearby that it would be easy to walk past without recognising it for what it is. That ambiguity is part of what makes it worth pausing over: the archaeology has not disappeared so much as it has been gradually translated into the mundane language of agricultural enclosure, each generation of land use quietly reshaping the evidence left by the last.