The banks, each roughly one and a half to two metres wide and between thirty and sixty centimetres high, are modest enough to walk past without a second thought. What makes them worth pausing over is the question of what they once organised, and for whom.

The banks appear to have formed paddocks, the small enclosed divisions used to manage livestock at close quarters, connected to a farmhouse and yard that once stood immediately to the west. That farm shows up on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, and again on the revised edition of 1900, which gives a useful bracket for thinking about the landscape. Field banks of this kind, built up from soil cleared or scraped from the surrounding ground, were a common way of defining and subdividing land before post-and-wire fencing became widespread. They required labour rather than materials, and their low profiles today are the result of gradual weathering and the slow work of grazing animals over many decades. The slope on which they sit would have added its own complications, making drainage and the containment of animals slightly more demanding than on flatter ground.