The scale of it is quietly remarkable, and yet it sits largely unnoticed, its outlines legible only from aerial imagery rather than from any roadside vantage point or visitor panel.

Within this field system lies a dense concentration of cashels, enclosures, and hut sites. A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, a form of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, typically associated with a single family or small farming community. The field boundaries here are thought to be broadly contemporary with these structures, meaning the whole complex may represent an organised early farming landscape, fields and settlements laid out together as part of the same way of life. There may, however, be earlier elements woven into the pattern, suggesting the slopes of Knockauns were attracting settlement and cultivation before even that period. The system was identified through Digital Globe satellite imagery captured between 2011 and 2013, which speaks to how much of Ireland's upland archaeology remains documented only at a distance, known to exist but rarely visited or discussed.