Turf-cutting on a west-facing hillside has gradually peeled back the peat to reveal a network of ancient stone field boundaries, their curvilinear walls protruding intermittently from the remaining uncut bog across an irregularly shaped area roughly 700 metres north to south and 600 metres east to west. The walls themselves are modest, reaching no more than half a metre in height and 0.6 metres in thickness, but their survival is the point. Where the ground dips into marshy hollows, the walls simply continue into the uncut bog, preserved beneath it as though the day's work was left unfinished.

What makes Cloontreem genuinely arresting is the density of activity concentrated within this single field system. Alongside the walls, which are built with stones set roughly at right angles to the wall line, there are seven hut sites and a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by a mound of burnt and shattered stone, usually found near a water source and associated with the Bronze Age. There is also an enclosure within the network. Taken together, these features suggest not a single episode of land use but a sustained, organised community presence, one that was eventually overtaken by bog growth and left sealed beneath it until turf-cutters began working the hillside. The gaps and breaks in the walls are part of the picture too, recording the slow collapse or deliberate dismantling that preceded abandonment.