The pillars rise to just over four metres and stand roughly three metres apart, their original roughly dressed limestone now largely concealed beneath a later course of red brick. On the more northerly pillar, some of that brick has been knocked away, accidentally or otherwise, leaving the older stonework exposed in a way that functions as a kind of accidental cross-section through the site's own building history.

The gateway belongs to the bawn wall surrounding Carrigaholt tower house, a bawn being the defensive enclosure, typically walled, that often accompanied an Irish tower house to protect livestock and provide a first line of defence. Iron hinge loops survive on the inner faces of both pillars, the fittings for gates that are long gone. A later estate wall, presumably from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, has been driven directly into the western side of the more southerly pillar, which says something about how the priorities of estate management eventually overrode any concern for what was already standing. A circular turret from the same broad period, the eighteenth to nineteenth century, sits at the north-east corner of the walled area, built along the line of the original bawn wall rather than replacing it, so that the older boundary and the later addition now share the same alignment.