Karst is the distinctive landscape formed where soluble limestone bedrock has been slowly worn and dissolved by water over millennia, producing the bare, fissured terrain so characteristic of the Burren region. Within this setting, the walls are easy to overlook as simply part of the general scatter of stone, but their regularity and alignment suggest something deliberate rather than incidental.

Walls of this kind, when they appear in parallel runs across open ground, are generally understood to represent early field systems, the remnants of organised agricultural land division from periods long before modern farming reshaped the countryside. Their age at Dangan has not been precisely established, though they are considered likely to be of some antiquity. The site was noted by Ros Ó Maoldúin, and its extent across the karst gives a sense of how thoroughly this landscape was once managed and divided by communities whose names and dates have not come down to us alongside the stonework they left behind.