Measuring roughly four and a half kilometres along its north-east to south-west axis and nearly three kilometres across, it is not a single monument but an entire prehistoric landscape, the kind of organised, bounded territory that speaks to settled communities working the land across generations.

The system runs from Gleninsheen in the south-west, across the full breadth of Aillwee Hill, to Kilweelran in the north-east. Within that broad extent lie cairns, cashels, hut sites, enclosures, and fulachtaí fia. Cashels are stone-walled circular enclosures, typically associated with early medieval settlement and livestock management, while fulachtaí fia are burnt mounds, the debris left by a cooking or processing method that involved heating stones and dropping them into water-filled troughs; they are found across Ireland from the Bronze Age onwards and are often clustered near water sources. The concentration of so many different monument types within a single field system suggests that this part of the Burren was not merely farmed but continuously inhabited, reorganised, and used for a wide variety of activities over a very long period. The landscape here has a way of preserving these things: the thin soil over bare karst limestone makes large-scale ploughing impractical, so walls and earthworks that would have been obliterated elsewhere remain more or less where they were left.