To a casual eye it might read as nothing more than a soggy field, but what it actually represents is a carefully engineered medieval fish-pond system, complete with a breeding pond, a feeding canal, earthen dividing banks, and stone-lined drains still fitted with metal grilles. The whole arrangement is far more deliberate and complex than the word "pond" might suggest.

Monastic communities were often significant fish farmers, and Kilcooly Abbey, a Cistercian foundation in Tipperary, was no exception. The main pond runs roughly north to south and measures around a hundred metres in length and just over eleven metres wide. At its northern end, set at right angles, sits a smaller rectangular breeding pond where young fish could be raised separately before being introduced to the main stock. Both were fed by a canal running some two hundred and twenty metres along the eastern edge of the long pond, separated from it by a flat-topped earthen bank roughly three metres wide and standing about two metres above the canal surface. On the western side of the fish-pond there is a further earthen bank, and beyond a wide flat berm lies another linear depression that may represent a second canal, running parallel to the surviving one about twenty-five metres further west. Water control was managed through stone-lined drains positioned at either end of the canal, each allowing flow through a grille set across an opening in the drain wall. It is an arrangement that speaks to considerable planning and ongoing maintenance, not simply a hole dug and left to fill.

The site sits in open farmland and retains its earthworks largely intact, which is presumably why it carries a preservation order under the National Monuments Acts. The northern tip of the canal reaches to within a hundred metres of the abbey itself, making the physical relationship between the monastic buildings and their food supply unusually legible on the ground.