Beneath the grass and bog, a series of low parallel ridges runs across the land, the faint but legible signature of people who once worked this soil to grow food. These are cultivation ridges, sometimes called lazy beds, a method of raised-bed tillage used extensively in Ireland from the medieval period through to the nineteenth century. The technique involved mounding soil into long narrow strips, improving drainage on waterlogged or thin ground and concentrating nutrients where crops, typically potatoes or oats, would be planted. Where they survive, they do so largely because the land was eventually abandoned and never ploughed flat again.

The presence of such features at Béal Deirg Beag connects the townland to a broader story visible across the west of Ireland, where marginal land was brought into cultivation under pressure of population growth, subdivision of holdings, and the particular agricultural conditions of pre-Famine rural life. The ridges that remain are, in a quiet way, a record of that pressure, of families farming ground that would not otherwise have been worth the effort. When the conditions that made such intensive smallholding necessary collapsed, most dramatically after the Famine of the 1840s, large areas of cultivated land in Connacht were simply left. The ridges fossilised in place, slowly greening over but retaining their form beneath the surface vegetation.