Nobody recorded who dug it, or exactly when, but the reason is not hard to guess: somebody believed there was treasure underneath, and decided to look. They were not the first to disturb this place, and probably not the last.

The site at Killuragh is a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular enclosure built from earthen banks, typically dating from the early medieval period and used as a defended farmstead. This particular example sits in pasture on a break in an east-south-east-facing slope, and its outline is surprisingly well-documented. The Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1842, showing a circular enclosure of around 45 metres in diameter; later surveys from 1905 and 1935 recorded it again as a raised circular area of roughly 40 metres across. On the ground today, the rath measures approximately 46 metres north to south and 41 metres east to west. Its grass-covered outer bank rises to an external height of around 2.1 metres, with a shallower inner face and a second earthen bank surviving along the eastern to southern arc. A shallow fosse, the defensive ditch that would originally have run around the outside, is still faintly visible. Because the bank profile has been worn down over centuries, the interior has taken on a distinctive saucer-like shape, dipping gently towards the south-east.

What makes Killuragh quietly notable is the accumulation of intrusions the site has absorbed. A drainage pipe was inserted across it at some point, a water mains pipe and feeding trough occupy the northern quadrant, and then there is that hole in the north-east, dug by someone acting on a suspicion that raths conceal buried wealth. It is a belief with deep roots in Irish folk tradition, one that has led to damage at earthwork sites across the country. Here, the archaeology of the place now includes the archaeology of everyone who has ever interfered with it.