Not through any deliberate excavation, but simply because the turf that buried them has been cut away over generations, leaving the underlying mineral soil exposed and, with it, the collapsed remains of field boundaries that had been hidden for an unknown length of time.

The walls themselves are modest in their surviving dimensions, roughly 0.6 metres thick and standing to about 0.3 metres in height, but their layout is what makes them quietly significant. Rather than running in straight lines, they are curvilinear, meaning they follow gentle curves across the landscape rather than the rigid geometry associated with post-medieval agricultural improvement. This curvature is often a marker of considerable antiquity, suggesting a period when field systems were laid out according to the natural contours of the land rather than the surveyor's straight edge. The walls run intermittently across the saddle of ground in a general north-west to south-east direction for approximately 160 metres, forming what was once a working agricultural boundary in what is now rough pasture on cutaway bog.

Cutaway bog, the term for bogland where the upper layers of peat have been removed through turf-cutting for fuel, creates an unusual kind of accidental archaeology. As the peat goes, so does its preserving, oxygen-poor environment, but in its place the stripped ground can reveal features that had been sealed beneath it for centuries. At Kilmackowen, that process has uncovered a fragment of an older agricultural landscape, the kind that rarely survives above ground elsewhere and is easy to overlook precisely because it offers no dramatic silhouette against the skyline.