What survives is a roughly circular enclosure, measuring around 33.5 metres north to south and 32.5 metres east to west, its outline now partly absorbed by a modern field boundary that cuts across the northern sector. The outer bank, never much more than about 0.6 metres high in the sections that remain, has a gently sloping inner face, and along the eastern and southern arcs there is still a faint trace of the original fosse, the defensive ditch that once ran around the perimeter. A rath of this kind, the Irish term for a ringfort defined by earthen banks rather than stone, would once have enclosed a farmstead, most likely dating to the early medieval period between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries.

The most telling detail about this site is what is no longer there. Local information recorded during survey work indicates that a large stone slab was removed from the western sector in the 1950s, when the rath was in the process of being levelled. The removal of such a slab, possibly a roofing stone or threshold from a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage often built within or beneath ringforts for storage or refuge, points to a more substantial structure than the present ground surface suggests. Levelling of this kind was common in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, as agricultural improvement schemes encouraged the clearance of earthworks that complicated ploughing and drainage. The site at Gowlane sits on a slight west-facing slope, the kind of elevated, well-drained position that early farmers favoured, and what remains is set within ordinary pasture that gives little outward sign of what was once a functioning enclosed settlement.