The more substantial of the two measures roughly ten metres along its north-east to south-west axis and just over five metres across, its mortared walls now reduced to less than a metre in height and heavily overgrown. A further wall line extends north-westward from near its corner, running for nearly eight metres before petering out. A second building of similar proportions lies about six metres further east, oriented roughly east to west, though this one has faded so completely from the landscape that it no longer appears on later maps, only on the first edition Ordnance Survey. What the two structures were for, and how exactly they related to the abbey beside them, remains an open question.

Corcomroe itself is a Cistercian abbey founded in the early thirteenth century in the Burren, that limestone karst landscape of north Clare where the rock pushes through the thin soil in great pale shelves. The Cistercians, a reforming monastic order who valued austerity and self-sufficiency, typically organised their abbeys around a cluster of functional buildings beyond the church and cloister, including barns, workshops, and accommodation for lay brothers. Whether these two structures formed part of that working complex, or belonged to a later period of use or occupation after the abbey's decline, is not recorded. The 1915 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the better-preserved building still legible in the landscape, while its eastern neighbour had already been reduced to something only the earlier survey had caught.