At least eight distinct enclosures survive, ranging in shape from rectangular to subtriangular, along with linear embankments and low platforms scattered across the ground, with the densest concentration of remains running down the northern slope. The larger enclosures are most likely tofts or crofts, the long narrow plots of land that typically ran behind a medieval burgess's house, while the smaller, flatter platforms probably mark where the houses themselves once stood.

The settlement did not appear from nothing. It grew up around an early medieval monastic site that already occupied this ground, and the monastery's principal structures still survive nearby: a church, a graveyard, and a round tower, the tall, tapering stone towers built from around the ninth century onwards as bell towers and places of refuge. By 1990, when the historian Empey compiled a list of medieval towns and settlements with borough status, Tullaherin was included among them, suggesting the place had at some point achieved a degree of formal civic organisation rather than remaining a simple rural cluster. The site sits on the brow of a gentle south-facing slope with open views across the surrounding countryside, though the ground rises to the west, and marsh closes in from the south-west, west, and north, a natural boundary that would have shaped how the settlement was laid out and how its residents moved through the landscape.