Turf-cutting, the slow annual work of extracting fuel from the bog, gradually uncovered them: field boundaries running in disciplined north-south and east-west lines, intersecting to form what was once a managed agricultural landscape, now buried between 0.7 and 1 metre under the surface of the peat. The complex extends across an area of roughly 140 metres by 250 metres, and the walls themselves, between 0.9 and 1.2 metres thick, are made of intermittent upright boulders packed with smaller stones between them.

Blanket bog accumulates slowly, building up over centuries as vegetation dies and does not fully decompose in the waterlogged, acidic conditions. A field system swallowed by peat to this depth was in use, and then abandoned, a very long time ago. The Iveragh peninsula, of which this valley forms part, has yielded abundant evidence of prehistoric farming communities, and a buried landscape of this kind is consistent with the gradual encroachment of bog that affected much of western Ireland during the Bronze Age and after, as climate shifted and soils became exhausted or waterlogged. The modern road that now bisects the site adds a certain temporal jolt: two different eras of infrastructure, one sunk in the earth and one running above it.

Close to one of the walls, a section of exposed bedrock measuring just over two metres by one metre carries something more unexpected: prehistoric rock art. The surface holds seven cup-marks, eight cup-and-rings, and a single cup-and-two-rings motif. Cup-marks are shallow circular depressions pecked into stone; cup-and-ring marks surround these depressions with one or more carved concentric circles, and are found across Atlantic Europe, most commonly assigned to the Neolithic or Bronze Age. Here, roughly half of the ring motifs are incomplete, likely worn away by weathering over millennia. A scattering of pock-marks beside the carved motifs adds further texture to the surface, though their relationship to the main designs is unclear. That rock art should appear so close to a buried field system, on the same slope, is the detail that quietly changes the scale of what is preserved here.