They are not ruins in any conventional sense, no collapsed walls, no identifiable rooms, just a pattern of banks, ditches, and enclosures running roughly northwest to southeast across the ground. What makes them quietly strange is that nobody is entirely certain what they were for.

The earthworks were identified during fieldwork in 1994 and stretch approximately 40 metres on their longer axis. The most westerly of the group contains something older and more legible at its core: a low horseshoe-shaped mound interpreted as a fulacht fiadh, an ancient cooking site of a type found across Ireland, typically associated with Bronze Age activity and characterised by fire-cracked stones and a trough for heating water. This older feature has been enclosed within a rectangular bank, which is itself part of the broader arrangement of enclosures. Two further rectangular enclosures lie to the southeast, each defined by a fosse (a ditch) and an outer bank, and they sit on a slightly different alignment, offset by about 4.6 metres to the southwest. The whole complex lies roughly 20 metres east of a large square earthwork considered likely to represent the medieval castle and bawn of Courtstown. A bawn is a walled or embanked enclosure attached to a castle or tower house, used to protect livestock and provide a defended outer yard. The proximity is suggestive, but the relationship remains unresolved. The earthworks could be settlement features tied to the castle, the kind of ancillary structures that would have supported a medieval household, or they could have been garden features, a possibility that changes the picture considerably and places them in a more deliberate, designed tradition.