On a plateau in Curraghduff, County Waterford, a roughly three-hectare expanse of grass and heather has been quietly divided into large rectangular fields for longer than any written record confirms. The walls that mark these divisions, stone-faced and running to about one and a half to two metres wide but only half a metre high, have the low, purposeful look of boundaries built to last rather than to impress. Each field measures something in the order of 150 metres by 50 to 60 metres, proportions that speak to organised land management on a meaningful scale, with streams running some 300 metres to the north-east and roughly 400 metres to the south-west providing the plateau's natural water supply.

What makes the site particularly telling is what sits alongside the field system. Associated with it are conjoined circular huts and two booley huts. Booley huts are small temporary shelters used in the practice of booleying, the seasonal movement of cattle to upland pastures during summer months, a form of transhumance once widespread across Ireland. Their presence here, alongside the more permanent-feeling field walls and circular hut structures, suggests a landscape that was used in a layered, seasonal way: permanent or semi-permanent settlement in combination with the rhythms of pastoral farming that pushed livestock up to higher ground when the lower pastures needed rest. The plateau setting, elevated and open, would have suited exactly this kind of summer grazing economy.