At least eleven rectangular house sites are visible, their grassed-over foundations forming a loose cluster within a roughly rectangular area measuring around 380 metres north to south and 210 metres east to west. The houses were substantial by the standards of rural vernacular building, averaging just over eleven and a half metres in length and more than six metres wide. Scattered among them are the remains of outbuildings and small fields, and in the southern field wall a low arched gateway still stands, a detail that gives the whole place an odd domesticity, as though the residents simply stepped away.

The settlement at Tonaroasty sits alongside an older monument that predates it by centuries. In the southern half of the cluster lies a cashel, a type of early medieval enclosure defined by a dry-stone circular wall, typically used to protect a farmstead or small community. The coexistence of this early feature with the later house foundations points to a landscape that was inhabited across a very long span of time, with later settlers perhaps drawn to ground that already carried the logic of previous occupation. The whole complex is protected under Irish national monuments legislation and is in state ownership, which reflects the significance placed on preserving it intact within what is otherwise ordinary agricultural land.

The site is low-lying and unassuming from a distance; the foundations do not announce themselves. The rough grazing that covers the area keeps the outlines legible without obscuring them entirely, and the arched gateway in the southern wall is worth locating as a focal point once you have taken in the wider spread of the foundations.