What looks like a scatter of overgrown ridges and hollow ground is, in fact, a curvilinear field system, its boundaries sweeping in curves rather than the straight lines of later enclosure, tracing out a pattern of human settlement that predates any living memory of the place.

An Air Corps aerial photograph taken in 1957 first brought the extent of this system into focus, showing it running approximately 900 metres on a north-northwest to south-southeast axis. Later satellite imagery confirmed not just the field boundaries but also a series of hut sites clustered within them, the remains of small circular or oval structures that would have sheltered the people who worked this ground. The whole arrangement may be connected to Cappanawalla hillfort, a substantial prehistoric enclosure on the same hill. Hillforts, which typically consist of one or more ramparts enclosing a hilltop, are generally associated with the later prehistoric period in Ireland, and the presence of associated field systems and habitation sites nearby suggests something more than a purely defensive or ceremonial function; this may have been a working, inhabited landscape for a considerable community.

The curvilinear form of the field boundaries is itself worth pausing over. Unlike the rectilinear grid imposed on the Irish countryside during the post-medieval period, curvilinear field systems tend to follow the natural contours of the land and are often associated with early medieval or prehistoric farming practice. Seen from above, the Ballyconry system has a flowing, almost organic quality that sets it apart from later agricultural geometry, a pattern shaped more by the slope of the hill than by any surveyor's rod.