There are no dramatic ruins, no obvious house foundations; instead, the evidence is in the earth itself, a series of low banks, walls, and a sunken hollow way that once carried people and perhaps cattle toward a castle and church. It is the kind of place that rewards slow walking and a willingness to read landscape rather than stonework.

The earthworks at Raheen cluster around a tower house and its bawn, the latter being a walled enclosure typically built to protect livestock and outbuildings around an Irish tower house. Scholars Fanning and O'Brien, writing in 1973 to 1974, proposed that the banks and walls visible to the north and south of the castle represent what they termed a medieval rural settlement of Anglo-Norman character, suggesting that English or Norman settlers established a small farming community here sometime in the medieval period. The bawn itself may overlie an even earlier structure, possibly a ringfort or an Anglo-Norman ringwork, pointing to successive phases of occupation on the same raised ground. Running roughly northwest to southeast some 25 metres north of the castle, a sunken earthwork approximately 27 metres long and 4 metres wide is interpreted as a hollow way, the kind of worn trackway that forms gradually under the repeated passage of feet and hooves. South of this probable roadway, a rectangular earthen bank may mark out a small medieval field or paddock. The area to the south of the tower house, by contrast, appears to be largely bare rock, partially quarried, and has yielded no evidence of house sites. The church and graveyard lie roughly 50 metres to the west.

The hollow way is most clearly visible on aerial photography, so arriving with a satellite image downloaded in advance will help orient a visit. The earthworks are confined to one field, so access depends on the usual courtesies around farmland. The banks are subtle and are easier to pick out in low winter or early spring light, when vegetation is thin and raking shadows bring slight undulations into relief. Look for the rectangular bank south of the hollow way, and note where the rock breaks the surface; that natural outcrop likely shaped the edges of whatever settlement once existed here, limiting where people could build and where they could not.