The walls are modest in scale, roughly half a metre thick and half a metre high where they still stand, and they spread across an irregular area of approximately 150 metres north to south and 80 metres east to west. What makes them quietly arresting is the way they behave at the edges: where the peat cover is thin, the stonework protrudes above the surface, tracing a broken, irregular pattern across the hillside; where the bog deepens, the walls simply vanish beneath it. Intermittently along their length, upright stone slabs, standing between 0.4 and 0.5 metres high, punctuate the line like markers that once served some boundary or structural purpose now difficult to read.

Relict field systems of this kind are the skeletal remains of agricultural landscapes that predate the expansion of blanket bog across the Irish uplands, a process that accelerated significantly during the Bronze Age and into the early medieval period as a combination of climatic deterioration and human land clearance altered drainage and vegetation. The walls at Gortacreenteen sit on dry hill pasture to the north of a river, a position that suggests deliberate siting on ground that was once workable, even if the bog has since encroached from the lower, wetter ground. The mostly collapsed state of the walls is typical of such relict features; they were not maintained once the land went out of use, and the peat has done the rest. The upright slabs are a detail worth noting, as they may indicate a construction technique or a boundary-marking convention distinct from simple rubble walling.