But the field system at Kilcloony carries layers of occupation that researchers are still working to untangle, with boundaries that may belong to more than one period and more than one kind of settlement.

The fields first came to light through aerial reconnaissance in July 1967, when a Cambridge University photograph revealed a network of small enclosures extending to the north, east, and south-east of Kilcloony Castle, along with the trace of a north-south roadway some five metres wide running to its east. When surveyors visited the site on the ground in November 1990, those features were still legible as low earthen banks, though modern field divisions and cultivation ridges had accumulated across the same ground. The fields immediately to the south-east of the tower house appear to define its bawn, the enclosed courtyard that typically surrounded an Irish tower house for both security and agricultural use. Whether the broader field system belongs to the same phase as the castle, or represents an earlier or later arrangement, remained an open question. Subsequent work by FitzPatrick in 2019 added another dimension: the area forms part of a wider survey of the settlement associated with the Uí hUiginn, a distinguished Connacht family of hereditary poets, and further segments of levelled earthen banks to the north of the tower house have since emerged. These banks curve rather than run straight, which has led researchers to consider whether they might instead relate to a rath, a type of circular earthen ringfort, that lies roughly 150 metres to the north-west. A single field system, in other words, may hold the residue of a ringfort settlement, a medieval tower house and its enclosure, and the living and working landscape of one of medieval Ireland's most prominent bardic families, all folded into the same unassuming pasture.