What makes it worth attention is less the walls themselves than the logic, or apparent lack of it, behind them. Fields of wildly different sizes sit side by side: long, narrow strips running roughly 100 to 130 metres in length, broader near-rectangular plots, small irregular pockets barely 20 by 15 metres across, and tiny subcircular enclosures, known as pounds, perhaps used to pen livestock separately. Narrow passages just two to two and a half metres wide thread between some fields, almost certainly to move animals without losing them to the wider landscape. The whole arrangement shifts orientation mid-system, with one cluster of parallel fields running on a northeast to southwest axis and another running northwest to southeast, the two sets abutting each other without obvious reconciliation.

This is not the product of a single surveyor with a plan and a deadline. The irregular layout points instead to a system that accumulated gradually, field by field, as need and opportunity allowed. The walls, roughly built from limestone rubble with large boulders and outcrops of bedrock pressed into service as foundation stones, are between half a metre and a metre high and reflect the same pragmatic approach: you used what the ground gave you. The shape of many fields follows the natural contours of the terrain or traces the boundary between boggy and drier ground, which tells you something about the conditions farmers were negotiating. The system does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, but is visible on the 1919 edition, placing its construction most likely in the nineteenth century. It post-dates a cashel within it, a cashel being a stone-walled ringfort of early medieval origin, which the later field boundaries simply grew around and absorbed. Many of the enclosed areas are still scattered with boulders and small field clearance cairns, the accumulated debris of whoever spent considerable effort trying to make this difficult ground workable. Rough grass, bracken, heather, and blackthorn scrub now cover much of what they cleared. The whole system has since been absorbed into a regular grid of large modern fields, leaving the older, stranger geometry underneath.