On a col in the Comeragh Mountains, roughly two hectares of gentle south-facing slope hold about fifteen low mounds of stone that most walkers would step over without a second thought. These are clearance cairns, the accumulated debris of people who once pulled rocks from the ground to make the land workable, piling them into rough heaps that now sit beneath grass and heather, their profiles barely thirty centimetres high and their diameters ranging from three to eight metres. Individually they look like nothing much. Together, they compose a quiet record of agricultural effort carried out at considerable altitude.

The cairnfield at Graigavalla sits on the north-east-facing slope of the Comeraghs, and its full picture is more layered than the clearance work alone suggests. Running across the site is an old field wall, about a hundred metres long and oriented north-east to south-west, its width between one and a half and two metres. Among the cairns there is also a ring-cairn, a type of prehistoric monument in which stones are arranged in a roughly circular bank enclosing a central space, distinct from the utilitarian clearance heaps around it. There is, too, a booley hut: the remains of a temporary seasonal shelter used during the practice of booleying, whereby cattle and their herders moved to upland grazing in summer and returned to lower ground before winter. That combination, prehistoric monument, field clearance, boundary wall, and seasonal settlement, means the site carries traces of several different phases and modes of land use, each one faint on its own but collectively suggesting a landscape that people returned to and worked in different ways across a very long period.