Visible only as faint undulations in pasture on a gently west-facing slope, the earthworks at Garranacanty are the sort of remains that a farmer might walk across daily without registering as anything unusual. What drew attention to them was not a chance find during ploughing but a set of aerial photographs taken in July 1966, which revealed patterns in the ground that are all but invisible from eye level.

The site sits in close relationship with a moated site, a type of enclosed medieval settlement in which a raised platform was surrounded by a water-filled ditch, typically associated with Anglo-Norman colonisation of Ireland from the late twelfth century onwards. The earthworks here appear to extend from and around that enclosure in several directions. A linear feature roughly seventy metres long runs south from the north-east corner of the moated platform, flanking its eastern side. From a nearby point, a shallow linear depression, only about five centimetres deep and running approximately forty-five metres in a west-south-west to east-north-east direction, extends outward, with a second parallel depression lying to its north-west. The undulations recorded in the fields to the west and north of a possible annexe adjoining the moated enclosure may represent the remains of a leat system, that is, an artificial channel used to direct water, possibly to feed the moat itself or to serve some agricultural or milling function associated with the medieval settlement.