What makes the site at Corrowle particularly interesting is the ambiguity built into its biography: it may be an early medieval ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead, defined by a raised bank and external ditch, that tens of thousands of Irish farming families occupied between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, or it may have been repurposed in the Georgian era as a tree-ring, an ornamental planting feature used to frame a country house landscape. It is possibly both, one function layered quietly over the other.

The earthwork measures approximately 41 metres north to south and 40.5 metres east to west, and retains a well-defined earth and stone bank some 2.8 metres wide. The bank stands between 0.8 and 1.15 metres high on its interior face and around 1.2 metres on the exterior, with a V-shaped fosse, essentially a rock-cut or earthen ditch, running outside it, 3.5 metres wide and 0.8 metres deep. The fosse fades from visibility at the northern side. Three mature trees grow in the north-west quadrant, one oak and two beech, and hedgerow has been planted along the eastern arc to serve as a field boundary. It is the combination of these features, the relationship to the house, the avenue, and a probable tree-ring visible to the south, that raises the question of Georgian reuse. Country house owners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were known to incorporate existing earthworks into their designed landscapes, finding in ancient monuments a ready-made air of antiquity and picturesque irregularity. Whether the ringfort was already there and simply absorbed, or whether the bank was partly shaped or enhanced for the new purpose, remains an open question.