Scattered across the monastic quarter of the island is a network of low drystone walls, paved ways, and earthen banks that once organised the landscape into something between a sacred circuit and a working farm. What looks at first like random field division turns out to be the physical infrastructure of medieval pilgrimage, overlaid on, and in places intercut with, some of the earliest human activity on the island.

The network functioned primarily as a framework for pilgrimage rounds, the prescribed circuits between holy sites that were a central feature of Irish devotional practice. Rough drystone enclosures were linked by equally rough paved ways covering the monastic quadrant of the island, and pathways connecting the different churches began to take shape as early as the late thirteenth century. The system kept developing, however, well into the late seventeenth and possibly the eighteenth century. In its later phases, a broad paved road up to nine metres wide ran between St Caimin's Church on the eastern side of the island and St Mary's Church, while a separate pathway of up to 6.3 metres in width connected a landing point at the island's northern tip with the main ecclesiastical complex. Beneath these later features, excavation uncovered something older still: a bank-and-ditch system running south from a central D-shaped enclosure toward St Brigid's Church has been radiocarbon dated to between approximately 778 and 985 AD. A late eighth to early ninth-century bronze pin found in its primary fill corroborated that date, placing the earliest phase of organised land division on the island firmly within the early medieval period. Ridge and furrow traces, the corrugated impression left by repeated ploughing in narrow strips, are visible across the island as well, a reminder that the enclosures served practical agricultural purposes alongside their devotional ones.