The walls, roughly half a metre thick and standing to about sixty centimetres where they emerge, run in both straight lines and gentle curves across a roughly rectangular area some three hundred metres north to south and a hundred and fifty metres east to west. They protrude intermittently, disappearing into patches of uncut bog and broken by gaps along their length, giving the landscape a half-legible quality, as though a document had been partly erased.

What makes the site particularly arresting is not the field boundaries themselves but what lies within them. Scattered across this same enclosed area are eight fulachtaí fia and two burnt mounds. Fulachtaí fia are among the most widespread prehistoric monuments in Ireland: cooking or processing sites, typically Bronze Age in date, identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal built up around a trough. The accepted explanation for most of them is that water in the trough was heated by dropping in stones fired in a nearby hearth, though the exact purposes, whether cooking, bathing, or industrial processing, have been debated at length. Finding eight of them concentrated within a single relict field system, alongside two further burnt mounds, suggests this particular hillside above Glengarriff saw sustained and organised activity over a long period. The bog that has obscured so much of the site has, in the way of bogs, also helped preserve it, keeping the stones in roughly the positions they were abandoned in, whenever that was.