It sits atop a low limestone hillock in rough pasture, and by all cartographic accounts it ought to be visible enough, a circular earthen enclosure roughly twenty metres across, with an embanked perimeter that would once have marked the boundary of an early medieval farmstead. But the monument is now entirely swallowed by briars and thorn scrub, the kind of dense, impenetrable growth that accumulates over decades of neglect and effectively erases a structure from the landscape without removing a single stone.

A rath, to use the Irish term, is a ringfort defined by earthen banks rather than stone walls, and these enclosures were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically housing a single farming family and their livestock. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. The Boolaglass example was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1923, which captured its circular outline clearly enough to establish its diameter and the presence of an enclosing bank. That cartographic record is now, in practical terms, the clearest view anyone is likely to get of it. Denis Power compiled the site record, uploaded in August 2011, and noted that the monument had by then been entirely overtaken by vegetation.

The site lies in rough pasture, which suggests it sits outside actively managed agricultural land, a circumstance that probably accounts for both its survival as an earthwork and its disappearance beneath scrub. The limestone hillock it occupies would have made it a logical choice of location for an early medieval enclosure, offering modest elevation and reasonably well-drained ground. For anyone curious enough to seek it out, the thorn cover means there is little to observe at ground level beyond the general rise of the hillock itself. The value of visiting, if there is one, lies less in what can be seen than in the awareness of what is there beneath the growth, an enclosure that outlasted its inhabitants by well over a millennium, only to be obscured not by time but by a few decades of briars.