These are not the remains of a field system anyone ploughed or planted in living memory. Where modern drainage channels have cut through the lower slopes, the walls are revealed to have been built directly on the old ground surface that existed before the bog formed, suggesting considerable antiquity. Higher up, where the peat cover is thin, the walls still stand up to a metre above ground. They average 1.2 metres in width and are built in a consistent technique: upright slabs set on edge at intervals, with loose stone rubble packed between them. In most places only the tops of the uprights protrude, the rest buried beneath soft ground.

The walls do not stand alone. Towards the north-western end of the system, three small huts appear to belong to the same phase of activity. The most legible of these sits 67 metres south of the Ferta river, a subrectangular structure defined by edge-set slabs, measuring roughly 3 by 4 metres internally. A narrow entrance gap, about 0.8 metres wide, opens northward into an adjoining circular enclosure some 4 by 5 metres across. To the north of that enclosure, a small ring of large slabs may have served as a shelter for animals. Further east, roughly 230 metres away, are the foundations of a pair of conjoined circular huts, and at a similar distance to the north-east a second pair of conjoined circular huts survives in corbelled drystone construction, corbelling being a technique in which stones are laid in overlapping courses to form a self-supporting roof or wall without mortar. These latter huts are compact, their internal dimensions running between 2.5 and 2.9 metres. Together, the walls and huts point to a community making use of this upland valley, probably for seasonal grazing, at a period before the landscape was overtaken by bog. The entire complex was documented as part of a thorough archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula published by Cork University Press in 1996.