The rath at Dunbell Big in County Kilkenny is no longer there to visit; it was quarried out of existence entirely. What remains is the excavation record, and that record is unusually vivid. When the site was investigated, the fosse, a rock-cut ditch roughly four metres wide and two metres deep and V-shaped in section, was found to contain not just collapsed bank material but animal bone and, lodged in the lower fill, a barrel-lock key dated to somewhere between the 8th and 10th centuries. Inside, the foundations of two structures were uncovered: one square at six metres, one circular at six and a half metres, each apparently laid out in relation to the other. Beneath all of this, pre-dating the ringfort itself, were two prehistoric burials, along with worked flint and chert.

The site sat within a cluster of enclosures spread across the townland, and three of those neighbours were already being demolished in the 19th century, shovelled apart and spread on the fields as fertiliser. A local antiquarian named Prim documented the process with some care in papers published between 1852 and 1855. He recorded what came up during the destruction of the third enclosure: bones of deer, oxen, horses, swine, domestic fowl, and cattle, found in thick layers through the central mound and concentrated in the inner fosse. Eight or ten small circular pits, each packed with charcoal, burned stones, and charred bone, appeared to have served as cooking places and, in some cases, as furnaces for working iron. The finds pulled from the same ground included portions of nine rotary querns used for grinding grain, hone stones, bone pins, beads and a comb, circlets of black slate and jet, a small iron square bell, an axe-head, knife blades, a chisel, a reaping-hook, a horse-shoe, and two bronze fibulae, the safety-pin-style brooches common to the early medieval period. Fragments of pottery were rare enough that Prim noted in a follow-up article that not a single further sherd had been found across any of the Dunbell raths after 1852. By the time an aerial photograph captured a faint cropmark at the site in July 1967, the other enclosures were already ghosts in the soil. Trial trenching between September 1990 and January 1991 confirmed the oval outline of this last rath, roughly 50 metres east to west, with a causeway entrance and the V-cut fosse. Not long after, quarrying removed what was left.