The land is poorly drained and thick with vegetation, the kind of terrain that discourages close inspection but also, conveniently, discourages the disturbance that might otherwise have erased what lies beneath. From the hillside there are wide views sweeping from north through east to south, a panorama that would have made the location attractive to early farmers and settlers long before the present landscape settled into its current shape.

The field system is connected, at least in part, to a nearby ringfort. A ringfort is a roughly circular enclosure, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, used as a farmstead or settlement during the early medieval period in Ireland, broadly from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries. The traces of field boundaries running northward from the ringfort suggest the two features were part of the same agricultural landscape, the fields serving the enclosed settlement just as one might expect. The aerial photograph remains the primary record of the system's extent, since dense vegetation on the slope made any meaningful ground-level examination impossible at the time of survey.