The walls are built in the drystone tradition, meaning no mortar, just carefully chosen stones balanced against one another, and in places the bog has crept up and swallowed them entirely, leaving only intermittent ridges in the rough pasture to suggest there was ever any order here at all.

The main enclosure is roughly trapezoidal, running east to west, wider at its eastern end at around sixty metres across and narrowing toward the west, where it spans approximately thirty-five metres north to south. A wall branches off from the southern side, roughly midway along the field's length, and runs south for about a hundred metres; another extends southeast from the field's southeastern corner for around thirty metres. What makes the site particularly layered is the settlement evidence clustered around it. At least five hut sites lie in the immediate vicinity, one of them directly adjoining the western boundary of the field. A further relict field boundary and a second field system are also nearby. Drystone hut sites of this kind, low circular or oval enclosures built without mortar, are found across many parts of upland Ireland and are often associated with seasonal or long-term farming activity, though without excavation it is difficult to assign a precise period to any individual example.

Taken together, the walls, hut sites, and additional boundaries at Gortlahard suggest a small farming landscape that was once genuinely busy with activity, shaped by people who divided ground, built shelter, and worked this hillside above the Sheen valley. The bog that now obscures parts of it is not simply decay; it is its own kind of archive, preserving beneath the surface what the eye can no longer read above it.