Its existence only came to light through aerial photography, which revealed a series of field boundaries running roughly north-northwest to south-southeast, their lines bending to follow the undulating contours of the ridge below. That these boundaries survived long enough to be photographed from the air, and yet left no trace on the standard cartographic record of the Irish landscape, gives some sense of how much organised land use has simply been absorbed back into the ground.

The boundaries were not isolated features. Aerial photographs identified subdivisions clustered in the vicinity of a cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort typically associated with early medieval settlement, and a rectangular enclosure, suggesting that the field system formed part of a wider and more complex arrangement of habitation and agriculture. The underlying pasture was reclaimed land, which may partly explain why the boundaries endured as long as they did before being lost. In the 1960s the field boundaries were levelled, most likely as part of land improvement work, and only ephemeral traces now remain on the ground.