What makes Carrownaherick unusual is the company the field system keeps: the walls wrap around a ringfort and, 175 metres to the east-southeast, a well-preserved circular drystone house, the three features together forming a coherent if fragmentary picture of how people once worked and sheltered in this landscape.

The site only came to light through aerial reconnaissance carried out in November 1987, when the low winter light and bare vegetation made the earthworks legible from above in a way they rarely are at ground level. The photographs revealed a series of small fields whose principal axis runs roughly north to south, their boundaries defined by drystone walls. Intermittent traces of cultivation ridges, the low parallel humps left by lazy-bed or ridge-and-furrow tillage, were also visible within the enclosures. Ringforts, which are roughly circular enclosures typically dating from the early medieval period, are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, but they are less often found in such clear spatial relationship with an associated field system and a surviving house. The circular drystone structure nearby, roofless but intact enough in its walls to be recorded as well-preserved, suggests a settlement that extended well beyond the fort itself into the surrounding cragland.