The low stone boundaries threading across the limestone pavement are easy to dismiss as the ordinary business of Irish farming, but they represent accumulated layers of human land-use that began before written history and continued well into the medieval period. What makes Berneens particularly striking is the sheer density of what accompanies these field boundaries: five wedge tombs, a portal tomb, cairns, cashels, enclosures, and hut sites are all present within the same area. A wedge tomb is a megalithic burial monument, typically dating from the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, characterised by a tapering chamber that is wider and higher at the front than the rear. A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort. The concentration of such varied monument types within a single field system is unusual even by Burren standards.

The Burren's uplands have preserved these layered landscapes partly because the thin, rocky soil never rewarded the kind of deep ploughing that would have erased evidence elsewhere in Ireland. The limestone pavement that looks so bare is in fact a palimpsest, a surface written over repeatedly across millennia. The field system at Berneens is visible on aerial photography from the period 2013 to 2018, which helped delineate its extent, but the mapped boundaries represent only a partial picture. Much of the system is thought to continue beneath scrub vegetation, and in places different field systems likely connect across areas that are currently obscured. Mapping from aerial or satellite imagery can only trace what breaks the surface or canopy; what lies beneath is a matter of ongoing interpretation rather than settled record.