A rath is a roughly circular enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period, defined by earthen banks and ditches and associated with farming settlements. The features recorded near this one at Lisnamoyle were altogether less legible: curving banks, roughly circular depressions, scattered mounds and tussocks of grass, arranged in no clear pattern and offering no obvious explanation.

When the field was examined in 1984, surveyors found themselves dealing with something genuinely ambiguous. The southern portion of the field, sitting in pasture prone to seasonal flooding and bordered to the north-north-west by a natural limestone scarp, showed mounds and vegetation growth that looked more like the accumulation of repeated waterlogging than any deliberate human construction. Further north in the same field, some of the banks and mounds were similarly uncertain, possibly natural flood deposits or possibly the remains of attempts to manage or contain the flooding. A cluster of five large stones, with smaller stones around them, was read as the product of field clearance rather than anything more ancient. The whole assemblage was inconclusive, the kind of palimpsest landscape that records human effort and natural process in almost equal and inseparable measure. Then, in the late 1980s or early 1990s, land reclamation works cleared everything away. By the time the site was inspected again in 2000, no trace of any of the features remained.