The enclosing wall, roughly 170 metres by 190 metres, traces a sub-rectangular boundary around the whole site, with a burial ground pressed against the eastern edge. It is an arrangement that speaks immediately to function rather than sentiment, and the function here was one of the bleakest Ireland produced: the workhouse, an institution introduced under the Irish Poor Law Act of 1838, where the destitute were housed in exchange for labour, and where conditions during the Famine years of the 1840s turned many such places into sites of mass suffering and death.

What makes Cooradarrigan somewhat different from the many workhouse ruins scattered across the Irish countryside is the later chapter attached to it. The complex continued in use long after the Poor Law era, eventually serving as a hospital. That role ended abruptly in 1921, when the building was burnt, a fate shared by a number of institutional and administrative structures across Ireland during the War of Independence, when such premises were frequently targeted or destroyed to deny their use to Crown forces. The detail is noted by Peter Somerville-Large in his 1972 account, which remains one of the few sources to record it. The entrance gate to the west and the stone-faced stream channel running through the interior are the most legible features that survive, the channel suggesting a deliberate and practical piece of engineering intended to supply or drain a facility that housed significant numbers of people.