Where a substantial earthwork once stood, there is now little more than an unevenness in the pasture, a subtle rumpling of the turf that most walkers would step across without a second thought. Yet local knowledge has kept the memory of it alive, and the land around it has never been put to the plough.

A rath is a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that was built and occupied across Ireland roughly between the early medieval period and around 1000 AD. They typically consisted of one or more earthen banks enclosing a circular area used for habitation and livestock. The Meeneeshal example was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 as a hachured circular enclosure, the cartographers' shorthand for a raised earthwork, measuring approximately thirty metres in diameter. It sat on a gentle south-south-east-facing slope, a position that would have offered decent drainage and some shelter. By the time the site came to be formally documented, the bank had been levelled, leaving only that uneven surface to suggest what once occupied the ground. The fact that the surrounding area was never ploughed almost certainly helped preserve even that faint trace, since repeated cultivation tends to erase subsurface archaeology far more thoroughly than simple levelling.