What look at first like natural undulations in the landscape are in fact cultivation ridges, the corrugated remains of a farming method known as lazy beds. These were raised strips of earth, typically built up by turning sod and heaping soil between drainage furrows, used to grow potatoes and other crops on wet or marginal ground. The technique allowed families to work land that would otherwise have been too waterlogged or thin-soiled to be productive, and it was practised widely across the west of Ireland for centuries.

Cultivation ridges of this kind are found throughout Connacht, but their presence on the slopes and rough ground of Keelogyboy is a quiet reminder of how intensively this landscape was once worked. The ridges are classed as archaeological monuments because they preserve, in physical form, evidence of past settlement and agricultural effort. In many cases across Ireland, sites like these date from the period before and during the Great Famine of the 1840s, when rural communities were farming every available scrap of ground. After depopulation, the ridges were simply abandoned where they lay, and the bog or rough grazing closed back over them. The earthworks that remain are fragile; peat cutting, drainage schemes, and land improvement work have destroyed comparable sites elsewhere, making surviving examples all the more significant as a record of a vanished way of life.

Keelogyboy is a sparsely settled townland, and the ridges sit within a landscape that has changed little in outward appearance since the post-Famine decades. For anyone walking the area, the corrugations are most legible in low, raking light, particularly on overcast days in autumn or winter when vegetation is low and shadows fall sharply across the furrows. They are easy to miss if you are not looking, but once noticed they are difficult to unsee.