These are not the remnants of a single farm or a single era, but a layered, multiperiod field system stretching across Gortaclare Mountain, the Coolnatullagh valley, Doomore, and Slievecarran, much of it only fully legible from aerial photography. The walls themselves take several forms, including mounded earth banks, mound-and-slab constructions, and contour walls that follow the natural lines of the hillside, suggesting different phases of use and different building traditions accumulated over a very long span of time.

Within the bounds of this field system lie at least three prehistoric farmsteads, several hut sites, numerous cairns and mounds, and at least one wedge tomb, a megalithic burial monument typically dating to the late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age. There are also three fulacht fia, a type of site found widely across Ireland, generally interpreted as outdoor cooking places where water was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into a trough, though their precise function is still debated. The clearest evidence for the antiquity of the whole system comes from excavation of a cairn within its bounds, which produced burial evidence dating to the Chalcolithic, the transitional period between the Stone and Bronze Ages, and into the Early Bronze Age. Researchers have drawn comparisons with the dated field systems on nearby Roughan Hill, where similar landscape-scale enclosures have been assigned prehistoric dates, lending weight to the idea that large portions of this Clare system were already ancient when the Bronze Age was still underway.

The system is most fully appreciated through aerial imagery, where the pattern of walls and enclosures becomes coherent in a way that is harder to read on the ground. Visitors exploring the area on foot may encounter individual walls, cairns, or earthworks without immediately grasping the scale of what connects them, which is itself part of what makes the place unusual: it is a landscape whose full meaning only emerges at altitude or over time.