The fields that farmers work today follow one set of boundaries; the fields buried beneath them follow another entirely. That misalignment, quiet and invisible at ground level, is what makes this place quietly odd.

The buried landscape came to light not through excavation but through aerial photography carried out in July 1989. Cropmarks, the subtle variations in crop colour and growth that appear when buried features interrupt the soil above them, revealed a fragmented but coherent pattern of rectilinear boundaries across an area of roughly twenty hectares. Some of these boundaries run perpendicular to one another, forming what were once rectangular fields. Crucially, this whole system sits on a different axis from the present field pattern, meaning that at some point the land was reorganised wholesale, and the earlier arrangement was simply abandoned and eventually buried. Within the same area, aerial photographs also picked out at least two enclosures and a circular enclosure, the kind of roughly circular earthwork boundary that often surrounds a farmstead or settlement. A linear series of possible pits to the north-east adds a further layer of uncertainty to the picture. None of these features have been dated with precision, and the exact period when this older field system was in use remains open. Relict field systems of this kind in Ireland can range from prehistoric to early medieval in origin, and without excavation the Ballycushen example cannot be pinned down more closely than that.