But the field system at Killeisk is quietly peculiar, not least because the ditches that once divided and enclosed this land were probably never meant to hold anything in on their own. Several of the enclosures take an irregular, roughly triangular form, and the ditches bounding them are so slight that, even combined with an earthen bank, they would have offered little resistance to livestock. The more plausible explanation is that these were bedding trenches for blackthorn hedging, a technique in which young plants raised elsewhere are transplanted closely together directly into a prepared trench, eventually forming a dense, living barrier. The ditches, in other words, were infrastructure for a hedge, not a boundary in themselves.