Look more closely, though, and the north-eastern face of that rise has been deliberately dressed with stones, shaped by human hands at some point in the past. Beside it, running roughly north-west to south-east, a four-metre-wide terrace cuts across the ground, most likely the surviving trace of an old field boundary. Together, these two modest features constitute what is recorded as a field system, though the word system perhaps overstates what is, in truth, a quiet and ambiguous arrangement of earthwork and stonework.

The features sit in close proximity to the Dunmoran rath, a circular raised enclosure of the kind that was typically used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or homestead, enclosed by earthen banks. The relationship between the rath and these field elements is suggestive rather than certain. The terrace between them could indicate that land around the rath was once divided and managed in some organised way, with the stone-faced rise perhaps serving a boundary or agricultural function. What makes the site particularly interesting is precisely what makes it frustrating: the antiquity of these features is uncertain. They may be early medieval, contemporary with the rath itself, or they may be considerably more recent. The natural origin of the wedge-shaped rise, subsequently modified by whoever chose to face it with stone, only deepens the ambiguity.