The traces are low earthworks, easy to miss at ground level, but from the air they resolve into a coherent pattern of field enclosures spread across roughly 10.5 hectares. Field systems of this kind are among the quieter survivors of Ireland's early agricultural past, boundaries that once separated pasture from tillage, or one holding from another, and which have endured only as shallow ridges in the turf long after whatever community shaped them has gone.

The site came to wider attention through an archaeological assessment carried out by D. L. Swan in 1996, in the context of a proposed development in the area. It was that work which produced the aerial photograph that first made the pattern of enclosures legible, and the site was subsequently recorded in the Archaeological Inventory of County Wicklow, published in 1997. Beyond the broad shape of the enclosures and their approximate extent, the notes are careful not to overreach; the date of the field system, and the people who built and used it, remain unspecified. That ambiguity is itself part of what makes such sites interesting. Without datable finds or documentary evidence, a field boundary can belong to almost any period, and the earthworks at Killoughter sit quietly in that open-ended category of things that are clearly old, and clearly human, but resist easy labelling.