That kind of visibility from the air combined with near-invisibility in documentary sources is one of the quieter puzzles of Irish landscape archaeology.

The field system sits close to a rath, the ringfort-type enclosure that was the typical farmstead of early medieval Ireland, though the two features are not necessarily connected in date or use. When cartographers from the Ordnance Survey recorded this part of Sligo in 1837, no trace of this rectangular network appeared on their six-inch maps. By the 1913 edition, a set of larger, irregularly shaped fields had been laid out across the same area, but there is no evidence that those later boundaries follow or overlie the earlier ones visible from the air. The conclusion drawn is that the field system dates to after 1700 AD, placing it somewhere in the post-medieval period rather than in the deeper layers of Irish agricultural history. That still leaves a fairly wide window of time and circumstance. The fields could reflect any number of episodes of land reorganisation, enclosure, or clearance that reshaped rural Connacht between the early eighteenth century and the era of the first systematic mapping.