That re-use tells you something about how the site was regarded: not as a place to be preserved, but as a convenient quarry. The rath itself, a roughly circular enclosure nearly forty metres across on a south-facing slope above the Emlagh river valley, remains densely overgrown and planted with conifers, its interior disturbed, its earthworks eroded, its original entrance among five possible gaps in the bank now impossible to identify with certainty.

The enclosure is defined by an inner earthen bank and fosse, a ditch, with the fosse rising 2.75 metres to the crest of the inner bank, though local tradition holds it was once considerably deeper. An outer bank, only faintly traceable along the western side, may be a later field boundary rather than an original defensive feature; the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map recorded it as just that. Inside, a curving earth and stone bank may represent the northern half of a circular hut, and a shallow depression to its south marks what was once a small stone-built souterrain, an underground passage typically used for storage or refuge, from which a considerable quantity of stone was removed over the years. It was from this souterrain, according to local tradition, that both ogham stones were taken. The first was found in 1853 by Hitchcock, already serving as a cottage door lintel in Lougher; it is now held in the National Museum of Ireland. When R.A.S. Macalister examined it in 1945, the base of the stone, concealing the last four letters of its inscription, was hidden within a wooden display stand. The second stone, inscribed with the partial text ERCAVICCAS MAQI CO....., broken at one end, was still acting as a lintel to an outhouse in Lougher until relatively recently and is now in the care of Oidhreacht Chorca Dhuibhne in Ballyferriter. Whether either stone originated here is not entirely certain, but this is the only known ringfort in Rathmalode townland, which makes it the most plausible source.