What looks at first like rough coastal terrain turns out, on closer inspection, to be the remnant of an organised farming system, its boundaries still legible beneath the surface.

The field system around Ballycahan in Ballyvoe townland is one component of a far larger medieval complex. Aerial photography, including Digital Globe imagery from 2011 to 2013 and Ordnance Survey Ireland orthophotographs from 2012 to 2018, has made the full extent of the system visible in a way that ground-level observation rarely allows. Across this coastal strip lie at least 34 cashels and 26 enclosures. A cashel is a stone-walled enclosure, typically circular, used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or settlement; the concentration of so many within a single field system suggests a densely organised community making sustained use of this land over a long period. The Ballycahan element sits in association with one such enclosure, and the wider pattern of boundaries, plots, and settled sites gives a sense of how thoroughly this coastline was worked and inhabited during the medieval period.