That combination, a defensive or agricultural enclosure still legible in the landscape while the community it sheltered has effectively vanished, gives the site an unusually layered quality. The straight eastern side is now just a post-and-wire field fence, but the western and northern edges follow a natural scarp, a pronounced shelf or step in the ground, that rises about 1.8 metres and runs some 16 metres wide. To the south, an additional scarp is incorporated into a field boundary and accompanied by an external fosse, a shallow ditch, roughly five metres wide. Chunks of dressed masonry lying within that fosse are thought to have come from the castle itself.

The settlement of Crampstown was made up of small houses built in random rubble, meaning stone laid without courses or formal dressing, a vernacular technique common across rural Ireland. By the time the site was examined, those houses had long since fallen and become overgrown. A large mound of earthen and stone material, roughly 40 metres long, 13 metres wide, and over 2.5 metres high, abuts the scarp at the south-east corner; this is thought to represent 1970s clearance of the collapsed settlement rather than any earlier feature. The enclosure itself measures approximately 93.8 metres north to south and 42 metres east to west, substantial enough to have contained a modest community alongside its castle. There is also a short return of possible man-made scarp at the north-east, suggesting the earthworks were not entirely the product of natural topography, though the distinction between shaped ground and exploited terrain is often difficult to draw cleanly at sites like this.