Mooghaun hillfort in County Clare is already remarkable for its scale and antiquity, but within its inner enclosure the landscape carries an older puzzle: stretches of walling that appear to predate the more recent patterns of agricultural enclosure on the hill, and that suggest people were dividing and managing this ground long before the hillfort's significance was forgotten.

Two walls within the south-eastern quadrant of the inner enclosure are considered likely to be ancient features. One of them, a collapsed and irregular bank of limestone blocks, runs for 45 metres, beginning roughly four metres west of the central cairn, a burial monument at the hill's core, and extending south-westward almost as far as the inner rampart. The proximity to the cairn is difficult to dismiss as coincidence. Whether the wall relates to the cairn in function or date is uncertain, but researchers Condit and Grogan, writing in 2005, identified it alongside other walling on the hill as evidence for more than one phase of enclosure activity across the site. The hillfort itself, a massive multivallate enclosure, meaning one defined by several concentric ramparts, belongs to the Late Bronze Age, and Mooghaun is also associated with the famous Mooghaun hoard, the largest find of prehistoric gold objects ever recorded in northern or western Europe. Against that backdrop, these field walls occupy a quieter register, ordinary in appearance but difficult to date and harder to ignore.