What makes them worth a second look is not their appearance alone but their construction: the walls, roughly 1.6 metres wide and 1.3 metres high, are built using large blocks of natural rock outcrop, incorporating the landscape's own geology directly into their fabric. That technique, combined with their substantial dimensions, suggests they may predate the more familiar field systems of the post-medieval period by a considerable stretch.

The walls run to the north and south of a fosse, the defensive ditch that once bordered a nearby enclosure. Enclosures of this kind, roughly circular or oval earthwork boundaries used to define settlement, farmland, or ceremonial space, appear widely across the Irish countryside and often date to the early medieval period, though some are older still. The proximity of these field walls to the enclosure ditch implies they may have functioned in relation to it, perhaps marking out agricultural land associated with whoever occupied or worked that site. A second, larger enclosure lies immediately to the south, suggesting this part of the hillside was once a more organised and inhabited landscape than its present scrubby appearance implies. The westward views from the hill are open and wide, which would have made it a practical as well as a defensible place to settle.