They are easy to overlook, the kind of feature that reads as a slight thickening of the ground underfoot rather than anything obviously archaeological, yet they represent the fossilised edges of a field system that may have been laid out and worked by the same community that built the ringfort beside it.

Ringforts, roughly circular enclosures typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, used as farmsteads from roughly the fifth century through to the twelfth. The field system at Ballymartin is thought to be associated with the adjacent enclosure, which suggests that what survives in the grass here is not just a boundary feature but the remnant of a working agricultural landscape, the managed plots and paddocks that would have surrounded a family farm perhaps a thousand years ago. The irregular shapes of the enclosed areas hint at ground that was adapted to local topography rather than planned on any grand geometric scheme, which is exactly what you would expect from incremental, practical land use over generations.