What survives today is barely legible in the landscape, a subcircular rath measuring roughly 32 metres east to west and 29 metres north to south, its outline preserved not by standing walls but by a scarp, essentially a worn earthen slope, and an external fosse, the shallow ditch that once helped define the enclosure's boundary. Modern field walls now wrap around the monument, folding it quietly into the working agricultural landscape that has surrounded it for centuries.

Raths of this kind were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a family farmstead, its timber buildings, and associated livestock. The earthworks at Ballygowan are poorly preserved, which is not unusual for low-status sites that never attracted later fortification or ecclesiastical association. Without those connections, sites like this one were simply absorbed into farmland over generations, their ditches silting up and their banks eroding beneath grazing animals and seasonal tillage. That a scarp and fosse remain at all suggests the original enclosure was reasonably substantial when it was first constructed, likely somewhere between the fifth and twelfth centuries, the broad period during which rath-building was most prevalent across Ireland.