The façade of a brick structure—with a sidewall jutting out to form a kind of corner—and a tree with a serpentine trunk take up the right half of the oval-shaped image. Light shining through the arched portal punctuates the façade and illumines the patch of grass before the entrance. A blind (blocked up) window is built into the wall just above this portal.

The image depicts a broad, flat plain, interrupted at its further end by a grey body of water. In the distance, a low mountain range looms in vague, dark contours against the sky, nearly touching the cloud formations above. Small, white buildings, dwarfed by the mountains, cluster on the plain between the body of water and the mountain range.

This depiction of an English ruin along the River Wye is well-balanced: trees gracefully line either bank; in the left background, a cluster of clouds reaches across the river in a figure that reflects the extension of trees from the right bank; and the ruins sit slightly off-center in the middle ground.

Louis Hawes notes that Romantic era ruins are often situated in the middle ground of paintings (“Constable's Hadleigh Castle 462). Although Warwick Castle is not a ruin, Fielding’s composition follows this trend, and additionally places the castle in the center of the lower register.