The walls are low, rarely reaching half a metre in height, and appear across the ground as meandering tumbles of loose stone and boulder, in places barely clearing the sod. They cover an extensive area but do not resolve into any single coherent plan, and they may not all belong to the same period. Scattered among them are disused stone-built turf stacks, remnants of peat cutting in the relatively recent past, some of which were apparently constructed using stones robbed from the earlier walls. The landscape here reads as a palimpsest of successive human uses, each one quietly cannibalising what came before.

An excavation carried out in September 1994 attempted to establish when at least part of the system was built and what role it played in the island's settlement history. The chosen wall, oriented roughly west-northwest to east-southeast and still buried under layers of peat, lay close to a circular house site and petered out near the sea-cliffs above Budawanny. Two trenches were cut across it, 145 metres apart. Radiocarbon dating, which estimates age by measuring the decay of carbon isotopes in organic material, produced a date of around 2,468 years before present from vegetal material at the base of the wall, placing its construction in the late prehistoric period. Peat sampled from immediately above the wall in the other trench returned a date calibrating to somewhere between the third and early fifth centuries AD, suggesting that by that point the wall had been abandoned and bog was already forming over it. In the central and eastern parts of the system, short linear spreads of stone mark what appear to be old tillage headlands, the boundaries between narrow cultivation plots that can still be identified by their relative smoothness and comparative absence of surface stone. Towards the southern end, the walls disappear beneath the course of an unfinished nineteenth-century road that runs down to the rocky shoreline at Lackwee. Near a rocky knoll to the north, a stretch of wall traces an irregular arc of around 35 metres enclosing part of an east-facing slope, associated with a possible cairn and a possible hut site. An early nineteenth-century signal tower, built to watch the approaches to the Irish coast during the Napoleonic period, stands near the northern extent of the system, accompanied by its own enclosure and a lime kiln, used for burning limestone to produce agricultural lime or mortar.