Stone walls and earthen banks dividing ground at altitude are not unusual in the west of Ireland, but on Slievemore they exist in a landscape already dense with archaeological remains, including the famous deserted village at the mountain's base, a neolithic court tomb near the summit ridge, and evidence of human activity stretching back several thousand years. A field boundary here is not simply a boundary.

Slievemore's slopes preserve some of the most legible traces of pre-Famine and earlier land use in Connacht. The deserted village below, a long street of roofless stone cottages, was associated with a practice known as booleying, the seasonal movement of people and livestock to upland pastures during summer months, a form of transhumance common across Ireland and the wider Atlantic fringe. Field boundaries on the mountain may relate to this pattern of use, marking out grazing territories or enclosures that were managed in conjunction with the temporary summer settlements. Whether any particular boundary dates to the medieval period, the post-medieval era, or earlier remains a matter for detailed survey work, and Slievemore has attracted archaeological attention precisely because the layers of human activity there are so compressed and so visible on the open mountainside.