What makes Rochestown unusual is not just the presence of a tower house and its bawn, the walled enclosure that typically accompanied such structures for defence and livestock, but the way excavation work has revealed the terraced fields and cobbled trackway of the community that once lived and farmed around them.

The written record alone is grim enough. In 1647, during the Confederate Wars, the castle was stormed by Murrough O'Brien, Lord Inchiquin, who killed its fifty defenders and burned the surrounding area. The Civil Survey compiled between 1654 and 1656 found only ruins: the walls of a castle and a smaller structure, both burned, a slate house, and a bawn. By the time that survey was taken, the place had already been reduced to a kind of archaeological record in itself. The more unexpected layer of the story came to light in 1981, when gas pipeline work prompted an excavation about 150 metres south of the tower house. The digging, led by MacLeod and published in the 1987 volume edited by Cleary and colleagues, established that the undulating terraces visible in aerial photographs were not natural but the result of deliberate human shaping, most showing evidence of ridge and furrow cultivation, the corrugated ploughing pattern common to medieval and early modern farming. A partly cobbled trackway ran through the site, connecting the terraces to the vicinity of the tower house and probably to associated dwellings. Among the finds were a gunmoney sixpence dated 1689, a coin type minted under James II from base metal as an emergency currency during the Williamite War, and sherds of seventeenth-century pottery. The excavator concluded the terraces were being tilled until the latter half of the seventeenth century. Two earthen platforms, one circular at around ten metres in diameter and one semi-circular, were also noted near the trackway and interpreted as settlement features. The site as a whole, tower house, bawn, church, graveyard, earthworks, and cultivated ground, represents a community caught at a particular historical moment and then abandoned to the ridge it had carefully shaped.