These are pre-bog walls, a term that places them firmly before the gradual spread of blanket bog that reshaped much of the Irish upland landscape over several millennia. The bog, in its slow accumulation of waterlogged organic matter, is a remarkable preserving medium, and walls sealed beneath it can survive in a condition that open-air stonework rarely achieves.

The site at Glancuttaun represents a group of such walls, running on both sides of a river, suggesting the deliberate organisation of agricultural land at a period when this terrain was open and workable rather than saturated and overgrown. Pre-bog field systems of this kind are known from several parts of Ireland, most famously from sites in Connacht where extensive Neolithic and Bronze Age landscapes have emerged from eroding peat, offering a rare glimpse of how early farming communities divided and managed their land. The Kerry example, catalogued by O'Sullivan and Sheehan in their 1996 inventory of south-west Kerry's archaeology, adds to a picture of a region that was once far more intensively settled and cultivated than its current appearance might suggest.