A cluster of linear and curvilinear earthworks, picked out by low sunlight and crop variation on an aerial photograph taken in July 1963, traces the ghost of a community that has otherwise left almost no mark on the landscape above ground.

The earthworks are arranged on either side of a relict roadway, roughly ten metres wide, which runs for approximately 220 metres on a north-northeast to south-southwest axis. That a road of this width survives as a landscape feature at all suggests it once served a settlement of some substance. What makes the site particularly interesting is the possibility that a series of earthworks running northwest to southeast from the lower eastern side of the road represent burgage plots, each roughly fourteen to seventeen metres wide and around eighty metres long. Burgage plots were the long, narrow strips of land allocated to tenants in planned medieval towns and boroughs, a system introduced into Ireland largely during the Anglo-Norman period. Their characteristic proportions, and the regularity with which they repeat along a street frontage, are among the clearest indicators that a settlement was laid out with some degree of deliberate urban planning, however modest the resulting town may have been. If the identification is correct, Stonecarthy was once not merely a rural cluster of farmsteads but something more formally organised, a small borough whose inhabitants held their plots by burgage tenure.