The field system here was never excavated, never fully surveyed on the ground, and no longer exists in any physical sense; it was destroyed by quarrying. What we know of it comes entirely from a single aerial photograph, which captured, in the faint differential growth of crops over buried soil and stone, the outlines of a world that had otherwise vanished.

The photograph records a network of fosses, that is, ditches dug to demarcate land, forming a field system connected to a rectilinear enclosure that is likely a medieval moated site. Moated sites are a recognisable feature of the Irish medieval countryside, typically consisting of a platform of raised ground surrounded by a water-filled or water-intended ditch, associated with the period of Anglo-Norman settlement from the twelfth century onwards. The arrangement at Caherabbey was more complex than the moated site alone. Immediately to the south of that enclosure lay a semi-circular enclosure, itself sitting within the north-eastern portion of a much larger, curvilinear enclosure that extended southwards but was never completed, or at least never completed in a form that survived. The combination of shapes, rectilinear and curvilinear, points to a layered history of land use, where different periods or functions left overlapping signatures in the soil.

The cropmarks that revealed all of this are a fragile kind of evidence. They appear when buried features, walls, ditches, or foundations, affect how plants grow above them, producing variations in colour and height that are visible from the air but invisible at ground level. At Caherabbey, that evidence is now doubly lost: the quarrying that removed the physical remains also destroyed whatever cropmark conditions might have recurred in future seasons. The photograph, reference GB89.AA.13, is the sole record of a field system that organised the working land of a medieval community and then disappeared twice over.