That older irregularity is not accidental. It reflects a pattern of land division that predates any systematic agricultural planning, shaped instead by the slow accumulation of boundaries across prehistoric and medieval centuries.

The fields at Gragan form the northern end of a much larger system stretching roughly three kilometres southward, running from just east of Corkscrew Hill down as far as Poulnabrone, the well-known portal tomb that marks the southern reach of this landscape. Field systems of this kind, built from the Burren's abundant surface limestone, are found across most of the upland plateau, their walls incorporating elements from different periods laid down over a very long span of human activity. What the 1970 Cambridge aerial photograph captured at Gragan is therefore a fragment of something considerably larger, the kind of evidence that becomes legible mainly from above, where the relationship between earlier irregular enclosures and later more rectilinear ones can be read as a kind of stratigraphic argument made in stone.

One of the complications with mapping such systems is that the walls do not stop where they become invisible. Scrub vegetation covers portions of the Burren uplands, and field boundaries almost certainly continue beneath it, recorded on aerial and satellite imagery only where the ground is open enough to show them. What appears on any map of the area is likely an outline of what survives in view, rather than a complete picture of what was once there.