Spreading across an area roughly 350 metres by 750 metres of boggy hill pasture, the field boundaries at Canagullen meander without forming any legible pattern. Straight stretches appear here and there, but none continues far enough to suggest a planned layout. The walls, each around 0.7 metres thick and originally standing to about 0.8 metres high, have largely collapsed, their rubble sliding downslope over time. What holds the eye now are the large lower-course stones, still protruding above the surface of the encroaching bog.

These are relict walls, meaning they belong to a period of agricultural activity that has long since ended, the land above them having been overtaken by peat. Bog growth in upland Ireland has swallowed considerable evidence of earlier farming, and what survives at Canagullen is a partial record of a working landscape whose chronology is not precisely known. The meandering, seemingly unplanned nature of the boundaries is itself telling: earlier field systems in Ireland often followed the natural contours of the land rather than imposing a geometric order on it, in contrast to the more regular enclosures visible from later periods. Those later, more regular walls are also present here, laid out alongside the older ones in a way that quietly maps the shift in agricultural practice across the same hillside. Within the network sit four hut sites, small structural remains that suggest people did not simply farm this ground but also, at some point, lived and sheltered within it.