The field system at Athdown covers roughly 3.75 hectares, its rectilinear plots running down a pronounced slope in a pattern that cuts straight across the boundaries of the modern fields laid out around them. That disjunction, old geometry colliding with new, is what gives the site its quietly disorienting quality.

The layout points to a form of land organisation that pre-dates the consolidation of holdings associated with later agricultural improvement. On the southern side of the site, the character of the remains shifts noticeably: here there are irregular fields alongside the traces of a small clachan, the Irish term for a loose cluster of dwellings, typically associated with a form of communal or family-based settlement that once dotted the rural landscape before clearance and famine reshaped it. The combination of the two elements, the ordered rectilinear plots running downslope and the more organic cluster of settlement to the south, suggests a place where arable management and domestic life once occupied the same ground. By 2006, however, the area had been ploughed and planted in forestry, a process that will have disturbed the uppermost layers of whatever archaeological deposit survived and now obscures much of what remains beneath a canopy of young trees.