Across much of the central and western end of the island, a series of field boundaries runs in different directions at once, some following curves, others cutting straight lines, together forming a palimpsest of agricultural activity whose precise age nobody has firmly established. What makes the arrangement particularly striking is what the boundaries do not respect: some of them run directly over the island's causeway, and others cut straight through house sites, as though laid down by people who either did not know or did not care what had been there before.

Nine house sites have been identified across the island, and they appear to belong to different periods, suggesting that people were living on and working this small patch of land across a considerable span of time rather than in a single concentrated phase. The field boundaries themselves are a mixture of earthen banks and stone walls, and traces of cultivation ridges survive within some of the enclosed areas; these ridges are the physical remains of lazy-bed or similar spade-tillage methods, where soil was built up in parallel mounds to improve drainage and increase the depth of workable ground. The fact that several house sites sit at the junctions of field boundaries complicates the picture further, making it difficult to say with confidence whether the boundaries were organised around the houses or the houses were later slotted into gaps left by the fields. The survey of the Iveragh Peninsula published by Cork University Press in 1996, compiled by Aidan O'Sullivan and John Sheehan, recorded all of this without resolving the chronology, and that ambiguity is itself part of what makes the place interesting. Church Island preserves not one landscape but several, folded into one another with the ordinary indifference of time.