Across a patch of the Iveragh Peninsula, old cultivation ridges still corrugate the landscape, the faint parallel swellings of a farming system long since abandoned. These ridges, sometimes called lazy beds, were a widespread method of tillage in Ireland, particularly suited to wet or poor soils: soil and turf were mounded into raised strips, improving drainage and allowing crops, most commonly potatoes, to be grown where flat cultivation would have failed. That they survive at all makes this a quietly arresting spot, the land still shaped by the hands of people who worked it, possibly generations before the Famine emptied so many Kerry hillsides.

What makes Gortagowan slightly more puzzling is the presence, at the centre of the site, of a low mound. On its western side sits a rectangular depression, a detail that does not fit neatly into the ordinary story of agricultural land. Whether this mound predates the cultivation ridges, or is contemporary with them, is not stated in the available record. The combination of ridge and mound, domestic farming layered over or alongside something less immediately explicable, gives the site an ambiguity that a tidier ruin would not have. The archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, catalogued the site as part of a broader effort to document the extraordinary density of human remains across this stretch of south Kerry.