The fields at Carrownaglogh are not visible in any conventional sense; they have to be found by excavation or by probing the ground with a rod, their outlines coaxed back into existence rather than simply observed. That combination of total concealment and extraordinary preservation gives this site a particular quality. The bog did not destroy the farming landscape here; it archived it.

Excavations and surveys carried out over several seasons during the 1970s and 1980s, associated with the researcher Herity, revealed a complex that included drystone field walls, a large stone-walled enclosure, a hut site, and extensive cultivation ridges, the kind of parallel earthworks left by repeated spade or plough tillage. A charcoal sample taken from beneath the enclosure wall returned a Bronze Age date, placing the earliest activity here somewhere in the second or first millennium BC. What makes the sequence especially interesting is what the walls themselves record. The oldest walls were laid directly onto mineral soil, as you would expect. But later walls were built on top of peat that had already begun to accumulate, which means the people farming here did not simply abandon the land when the bog began to encroach; they kept working it, adapting as the wet ground slowly crept up around them. Analysis of pollen cores, taken to reconstruct the ancient vegetation history of the area, showed successive episodes of woodland clearance and agricultural use stretching from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age, across several centuries, before the bog finally won and the entire landscape was buried. The cutaway blanket bog visible in the area today, where peat has been commercially removed in more recent times, is what exposed enough of the site to make investigation possible at all.