They rarely exceed half a metre in height, and in places their lines are interrupted where later generations appear to have robbed the stone to build turf stacks for drying peat. Easy to overlook, and partly obscured by centuries of peat cutting that has since stripped back to the mineral soil, the field system extends across an ill-defined area of at least 600 metres, petering out before it reaches the Lighthouse Road to the north and fading into intermittent traces near the stream known as Pollbrandy to the west.

What makes these unremarkable-looking walls genuinely interesting is the company they keep, and the sequence of occupation they hint at. The system sits in close proximity to a megalithic tomb, at least seven fulachtaí fia, and four settlement enclosures. Fulachtaí fia are prehistoric cooking sites, typically identified by the horseshoe-shaped mounds of fire-cracked stone left behind when water was repeatedly heated using hot rocks; they are found across Ireland in their thousands and are generally associated with the Bronze Age. In July 1995, a small excavation was carried out across one of the field walls at the point where it met the south-western side of one of the enclosures. The trench revealed that the wall, roughly a metre wide and set into a shallow foundation trench, actually predated the enclosure; the southern end of the wall appeared to have been partly demolished to make way for the enclosure's construction. Radiocarbon dating was not possible due to insufficient charcoal, but a collection of flint, chert, and quartz artefacts recovered from within the enclosure points to a prehistoric date, most likely the Bronze Age.

The walls, then, appear to record at least two distinct phases of prehistoric activity, with the field boundaries laid out first and the enclosures built later, sometimes deliberately cutting across or dismantling what came before. The Congested Districts Board boundary wall that now clips the eastern edge of the field system adds a further layer, a nineteenth-century administrative intervention in a landscape already carrying several thousand years of use. The whole area reads less like a single monument and more like an accumulation of decisions made and remade across an enormous stretch of time.