Running north to south across what was once open marshland, a series of cultivation ridges survive, each roughly two metres wide and about ten centimetres high, the kind of modest earthworks that are easy to overlook and easy to misread.

These are lazy-beds, a term that is somewhat misleading given the labour they required. The technique involved heaping soil and organic material into long parallel ridges, leaving drainage channels between them. It was particularly suited to wet or marginal ground that would otherwise be unworkable, and it was widespread across Ireland from at least the medieval period through to the nineteenth century, when the potato-dependent rural poor used it extensively on whatever ground they could access. The fact that these ridges sit on drained marshland suggests that the people who made them were farming at the edges of what was practical, coaxing crops from ground that most would have passed over. The dimensions here are modest, typical of hand-dug beds rather than anything ploughed, which points to smallholder agriculture rather than organised estate farming.