What survives is enough to read: a rath, the most common form of early medieval enclosure in Ireland, typically built between the seventh and tenth centuries as a defended farmstead for a single family and their cattle. The interior here measures about 29.5 metres north to south and 26.4 metres east to west, and a 7.4-metre gap with a causeway on the south-south-east marks where the original entrance once stood. Thorn bushes have taken hold along the scarp, which is still steep-sided despite the centuries, and a few unshaped stones protrude from the earthwork, though they show no sign of deliberate construction.

When surveyors recorded the site in 1971, and again on a return visit in 1977, they noted that field fences built along the north-east to south-east arc had obscured much of the outer fosse, that shallow ditch ringing the bank, while modern gaps had been cut through the bank on the south-west and north, likely to allow livestock through. The hilltop position, commanding good views to the south-west, west, and north, is typical of rath placement across the Irish midlands, where visibility and drainage were both practical concerns for whoever enclosed this ground. What makes the Mullaghcloe site more than an isolated earthwork is its immediate neighbourhood: a second ringfort lies roughly 300 metres to the north-east, and just 175 metres to the north-west are a holy well and a mass rock, the latter a flat stone used for clandestine Catholic worship during the Penal era when public church services were suppressed. Some 130 metres to the north, on the hilltop, surveyors identified what may be a seventeenth-century tower or small fortification, adding another layer to a landscape that seems to have drawn people, and structures, across many different centuries.