What was once a network of small, curvilinear and irregularly-shaped fields, laid out across average pasture broken by rock outcrop, has been so thoroughly erased by field clearance that almost nothing remains visible on the ground. Two enclosures, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary features commonly associated with early settlement and agriculture in Ireland, were also part of the landscape here; one has been almost completely removed, and the other entirely so.

The field system survives in the record because an aerial photograph, taken at some point before the clearance was complete, captured enough detail to document the layout. Curvilinear field patterns of this kind are generally associated with pre-medieval land use in Ireland, reflecting a way of dividing and working the land that predates the more rectilinear systems introduced in later centuries. The irregular shapes tend to follow the natural contours of the terrain rather than imposing a geometric order on it, which is part of what makes them legible as early features when seen from above. At Carrowculleen, that aerial evidence is now the primary, and perhaps only, meaningful record of what was there.