The earthworks cover a substantial area, roughly 367 metres north to south and 320 metres northeast to southwest, and include what appear to be rectangular house plots, irregular enclosures, a former routeway, and, in the northern portion of the complex, the faint corrugations of old cultivation ridges. The banks themselves are modest, nowhere exceeding a metre in height and between two and four metres at the base, the kind of subtle topography that registers more as a feeling of unevenness underfoot than as anything dramatic from a distance.

The settlement sits immediately to the southeast of an esker ridge, one of the long, sinuous gravel spines left behind by meltwater streams flowing beneath the ice sheets of the last glaciation. That ridge once carried a castle known as Tolendal or Tullendally near its southwestern end, and in 1618 a patent roll from the reign of James I records both features together as part of the holdings of an Isaac Lally, described as 'the castle, town and lands of Tullendally'. That single documentary reference is, for now, the clearest anchor the site has to a named person and moment in time. A possible church site in the vicinity may have formed part of the same medieval complex, suggesting that what survives in the fields was once something closer to a small nucleated community, with a castle above it, a place of worship nearby, and cultivated land spreading out around it. Some of the earthworks to the northeast are thought to have been damaged when a road bypass was put through at the Tullenadaly Cross Roads junction, and the N17 has since been built to the west, so modern infrastructure has quietly trimmed the edges of what was already a fragmentary record.