What was once a rath, a type of circular earthwork enclosure built during the first millennium AD and used as a farmstead by a family of some local standing, now survives in name and record more than in the landscape itself. The site has been levelled, leaving little for the eye to catch.

When Hurley and Hurley documented the site in 1979, they recorded a structure of some complexity: two earthen banks separated by a fosse, which is a defensive ditch dug between raised ramparts, along with a faint trace of a further outer fosse beyond that. A double-banked ringfort of this kind would have indicated a degree of status above the most basic single-bank enclosures that are common across Cork and the wider country. More intriguing still is the souterrain recorded in the interior. Souterrains are stone-lined underground passages or chambers, typically constructed during the early medieval period, and used variously for storage, refuge, or as escape routes. Their presence within a ringfort is not unusual, but they often survive even when the earthworks above them have been ploughed or graded away, since the underground structure is less easily disturbed by agricultural work.

With the surface features gone and no visitor infrastructure in place, Mallowgaton offers little to see in the conventional sense. What remains, largely invisible beneath the ground, is a reminder of how thoroughly the settled agricultural landscape of early medieval Ireland has been absorbed into the fields that followed it.