That positioning is no accident. Raths, the earthen ringforts that dot the Irish countryside in their thousands, were typically built during the early medieval period as enclosed farmsteads, the circular bank and ditch serving as much for status and boundary-marking as for any serious defence. The one at Drumshinnagh would once have commanded clear sight lines along the valley and northward across a wide stretch of bogland, the kind of elevated vantage that early farmers and their livestock would have made good use of.

When surveyors visited in 1997, the rath was still legible on the ground as a low, roughly circular platform, measuring around 26.6 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west. The defining feature was a broadly sloping scarp, the raised earthen edge of the original enclosure, running to about 1.4 metres in height on the eastern side and somewhat lower to the west. Even then, there were signs of earlier interference; the scarp appeared to have been partly levelled at some point, and shallow quarrying or disturbance was visible along its northern and southern edges. What the surveyors recorded in 1997 was already a diminished thing. Then, in 2004, something far more damaging occurred. A large rectangular pit was cut directly into the interior of the rath, running almost the full width of the enclosure east to west, some 24 metres across, and reaching a depth of two metres. The pit effectively gutted the monument through its centre, destroying whatever stratigraphic record, structural remains, or buried archaeology might have survived the previous centuries of agricultural activity and gradual erosion.