Low, grass-covered banks and walls, rarely more than thirty centimetres high and a metre or two wide, trace the outlines of a farming system that has long since been superseded. Stones and boulders protrude at irregular intervals from linear undulations in the ground, and faint cultivation ridges, the kind left by repeated hand or spade tillage, survive in places, though they are now barely discernible. The whole system covers roughly 3,000 square metres of gently rolling terrain, broken here and there by limestone outcropping, and it represents not a single dramatic monument but the quiet residue of ordinary agricultural life.

What makes Bunacrower particularly interesting is the relationship between this field system and the cluster of raths that sit alongside it. A rath, sometimes called a ringfort, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, typically associated with early medieval settlement and farming in Ireland, broadly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. There are at least five such enclosures in this immediate area, and the field banks not only surround them but in several places actually intersect with them. That physical relationship raises a question that has not yet been fully resolved: the field system may actually post-date the raths, meaning the small subrectangular fields were laid out after the enclosures had already been constructed, or perhaps abandoned. The banks themselves no longer define complete, coherent fields; what remains is fragmentary, some walls following natural contours or changes in ground level rather than any strict geometric plan. Over time, these small fields were levelled and absorbed into the larger, rectilinear enclosures bounded by drystone walls that characterise the landscape today. Lavelle, writing in 1994, recorded the system in its current degraded state, and the essential picture has not changed since.