Spread across roughly 24 acres, a series of relict field banks and low walls trace out a patchwork of irregularly rectangular plots, each measuring approximately 60 metres by 50 metres. What makes this particular arrangement quietly remarkable is that one of these fields was apparently laid out with enough deliberate care to neatly enclose a pre-existing enclosure, meaning the people who organised this land were working around, or perhaps in dialogue with, something already standing in the ground.

The field system came to wider attention through aerial photographs taken in 1991, which revealed the extent and layout of the banks in a way that ground-level survey cannot easily capture. The landscape has clearly accumulated layers over time. Running across the fields are north-west to south-east furrows, the traces of ridge-and-furrow cultivation that typically post-date the original boundary walls. More intriguing still is the relationship between the field walls and a nearby feature identified as a possible cursus, a type of long, narrow ceremonial enclosure associated with Neolithic and early Bronze Age ritual use, defined by parallel ditches or banks running for some distance across the landscape. Elements of the field walls appear to be cut by this cursus, which would normally suggest the cursus is later. Analysts have noted, however, that it might equally represent something as relatively recent as a roadway, making the sequence of occupation here genuinely uncertain rather than neatly resolved.

The site sits on level ground below the Slieve na Calliagh ridge, a hillscape already well known for its passage tombs at Loughcrew. The field system at Ballinvally adds a quieter, more agricultural dimension to the same locality, suggesting that the slopes and foothills here were being actively organised and farmed at some point, though exactly when remains an open question.