The ringfort that conceals it is easy enough to read as a slight rise in a field, but the souterrain at its centre, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge, gives the site a quietly layered quality that a casual glance does not reveal.

The fort itself is a rath, the most common form of early medieval enclosure in Ireland, built from earth rather than stone. At Maulrour it takes a roughly circular form, measuring around 26 metres north to south and 24 metres east to west. An earthen bank, still standing to about 1.3 metres in height, runs around the perimeter, accompanied on its southern and western arc by a fosse, the external ditch from which the bank material was originally dug. That ditch is now only about 0.4 metres deep, reduced over time by the slow work of weathering and land use. A short section of the bank to the north has been levelled entirely, whether by deliberate clearance or gradual erosion is not recorded. The interior presents its own small engineering detail: the ground on the western side has been built up to create a level surface, compensating for the natural fall of the hillslope, so that whoever once lived or worked within the enclosure had a usable flat space despite the gradient. Conifers planted outside the bank to the south and west now frame the site without quite obscuring it.