At Sandfordscourt, the tower house known as Cantwell's Castle anchors the site at one end, sitting at the south-west corner of a low mound measuring roughly 48 metres north to south and 41 metres east to west, rising to about a metre in height. Attached to the castle is a bawn, the enclosed defensive yard typical of late medieval Irish tower houses, where livestock could be protected and a household's daily life conducted within a walled perimeter.

From that central mound, the remains of the settlement spread out to the north-east and eastward for approximately 250 metres, taking the form of field boundaries, enclosures of both semi-circular and rectangular plan, and drainage channels. Together these features suggest a working agricultural community that once organised itself around the castle, its fields and yards laid out with some deliberateness before the whole was eventually abandoned and the land returned to grass and tillage. The site does not announce itself dramatically. The western portion of the field around Cantwell's Castle is now completely flat, with no earthworks visible at ground level at all. Further east, ploughing has disturbed but not entirely erased what lies beneath, and the irregular surface of the tilled ground still hints at the buried boundaries and structures underneath. To the south, the view is interrupted by a small hill; in every other direction the landscape opens out, which gives a sense of how exposed and yet how commanding this low-lying complex once was.