By the time archaeologists came to examine it on the ground, most of it was gone, cleared and quarried out until almost nothing remained visible at the surface. What survived were fragments: traces of a possible outer bank running from west to northwest and around to the northeast, and at that northeastern arc, faint remnants of a fosse, the defensive ditch that would originally have ringed the site.

The monument was apparently bivallate, meaning it had two concentric banks and ditches rather than one, which would have made it a more substantial enclosure than the average. A rath is a roughly circular earthwork enclosure, typically of early medieval date in Ireland, used as a farmstead or settlement and defined by one or more earthen banks. The landowner recalled the fosse as having been around six feet wide and ten feet deep, approximately 1.8 metres by 3 metres, dimensions that suggest a well-constructed defensive feature. The combination of its position at the ridge's southern end, the circular form recorded cartographically, and those surviving ditch measurements all point toward a rath, though the destruction of so much of the monument means certainty is out of reach. The place-name Lisgowla itself carries echoes of the original structure; "lios" is the Irish word for a ringfort or enclosure, so the name has quietly preserved a memory of what once stood here long after the earthworks were removed.