What makes it quietly compelling is the way different layers of that process sit visibly alongside one another: drystone walls between 0.9 and 1 metre wide and up to 1.7 metres high, field cairns where cleared stones were heaped into low piles, and beneath some of all that, the faint corrugated lines of cultivation ridges that appear to pre-date even the cairns themselves.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows this ground as largely open, with only a few enclosed patches at its western and southern edges and a scatter of rectangular houses along the northern road. By the 1930 edition, much of the area had been subdivided into contiguous rectangular fields, though an irregular patch of rough ground, running roughly 170 metres east to west and 100 metres north to south across the northwest and centre, remained unenclosed. The long, narrow fields in the eastern half of the area are particularly telling: they are reminiscent of the so-called stripes laid out by the Irish Land Commission, the body established in the 1880s to redistribute and reorganise landholdings after decades of agrarian unrest and clearance. Field cairns, the low mounds of stone gathered up from the soil to make cultivation possible, are a common feature of such reclaimed ground across the west of Ireland; the fact that some of the underlying ridge-and-furrow here appears older than the cairns suggests that people were farming this land before the more systematic nineteenth-century reorganisation took hold.

Along the southern limits of the area, more recent land reclamation has removed most of the field divisions, so the clearest survival of the historic pattern lies to the north and east, where the drystone walls remain largely intact.