What was once a coherent system of stone-walled fields, radiating outward from a central cashel across low-lying limestone grassland, was levelled during land reclamation works, leaving barely a trace visible to the eye. A cashel, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a stone-walled ringfort, typically of early medieval date, and the one at Caherwiclaun sits at the centre of what was clearly a working agricultural settlement of some complexity.

When the site was surveyed in 1986, the field system could still be read in enough detail to be planned to scale. The picture that emerged was of linear walls running on a roughly north-west to south-east axis, enclosing a series of rectilinear fields of varying size. Closest to the cashel, on its eastern and southern sides, lay a cluster of smaller subrectangular fields, each measuring somewhere between 35 and 55 metres at their widest, and these were further divided by internal walls into even smaller compartments. One of these enclosures contained a ruined rectangular house; two further rectangular structures, one confirmed and one probable, sat inside the cashel itself. Beyond this inner zone, larger fields extended outward in all directions, though how far the system originally reached was not fully clear even from the 1986 survey. What was apparent was that the whole arrangement pre-dated the orderly grid of large rectangular fields that now covers the same ground, suggesting an earlier, quite different logic of land division. By the time the site was revisited in 2000, the walls had been largely levelled, and only faint surface undulations and occasional linear cropmarks, places where buried stone affects how grass or crops grow above, remained to suggest that anything had been there at all.