That designation alone is worth pausing over. Field boundaries are among the most ordinary features of the Irish rural landscape, the low walls and earthen banks that divide one patch of ground from another, and yet their presence on the archaeological record signals that this particular boundary is considered old enough, or significant enough, to warrant protection and study.

Field boundaries of this kind can date from any number of periods, from the cleared and divided landscapes of early medieval farming communities through to the post-medieval reorganisation of land under landlord systems. In the west of Ireland especially, many boundaries encode centuries of agricultural practice, marking out land that was worked, argued over, subdivided, and sometimes abandoned during the upheavals of the nineteenth century. The townland name Prebaun, from the Irish, suggests a place with its own local identity long before anyone thought to survey it, and the boundary itself may reflect patterns of land use stretching back further than any documentary record can confirm.