It is not especially large, measuring around 32 metres in diameter, and what remains is an earthen scarp rather than a dramatic raised bank. But its position is deliberate and telling: someone chose this particular elongated glacial hill, shaped by the last ice age, as the right place to build.

The monument is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a class of enclosed settlement that was widespread in early medieval Ireland, broadly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Most were farmsteads, the homes of farming families of middling status, their livestock kept within the circular enclosure at night. The earthen scarp at Gowlaun is what survives of that original boundary. What makes this particular site quietly interesting is its landscape context. Roughly 240 metres to the north-west, on the crest of a larger drumlin ridge, lies a barrow, a prehistoric burial mound predating the ringfort by many centuries. Two different peoples, separated by a considerable stretch of time, were drawn to the same low cluster of glacially formed hills in this part of Clare. Whether that proximity was coincidence or reflected some long-held sense of the landscape's significance is impossible to say, but the pairing is worth noting.