Stretching roughly 900 metres from north-north-west to south-south-east, and around 300 metres across, the remains are poorly preserved in places, the walls reduced to rubble and often buried under briar and thorn. What makes the site genuinely unusual is that several distinct phases of agricultural organisation are legible within the same stretch of ground, though untangling their sequence is far from straightforward.

Some of the walls here are almost certainly pre-Famine in origin, reflecting the intensive land use that characterised rural Ireland before the catastrophe of the 1840s. Others appear bound up with the cashels, the stone-walled enclosures typically associated with early medieval settlement, that sit within the field system. A cashel functions something like a small fortified farmstead, its circular or oval enclosing wall protecting a household and its immediate activity. Three cashels have been identified in the midst of these walls, and the relationship between them and the surrounding field boundaries is complicated. Some walls post-date the cashels, suggesting continued agricultural use long after the enclosures fell out of primary use. Others appear contemporary with them, and some may actually pre-date the cashels altogether. Plunkett-Dillon, writing in 1985, noted the association between tumbled stone walls of this kind and ringforts and other medieval enclosures more broadly.

Two further field systems, each with associated ringforts, occupy the north-west and north-east of the valley, and it is possible that all three originally functioned as a single interconnected agricultural network, effectively covering the valley floor. The fact that recently reclaimed pastureland now extends up the ridge side means the surviving archaeology represents only a portion of what may once have been a continuous and coherent farming landscape, shaped and reshaped across many generations.