Spread across approximately twenty acres of slightly sunken ground, a relict field system of low banks and silted drains has quietly survived, its rectangular plots still legible in the topography even if their exact age and full history remain difficult to pin down.

The field system occupies a natural E-W dip or fold in the land, positioned at the headwaters of a small stream that runs roughly WSW to ENE. This kind of sheltered, well-watered ground would have been attractive to farmers across many periods, and the fields themselves vary considerably in size, ranging from plots of around 30 by 20 metres up to larger enclosures of roughly 60 by 50 metres, suggesting either different phases of use or different agricultural purposes running side by side. Some of the rectangular fields connect directly to a large enclosure at the centre of the area, which contains a burial ground, a structure, and what has been identified as an industrial site, hinting that this was once a working complex of some complexity rather than a purely agricultural zone. Two further enclosures sit within the field system and may form part of it, though the relationship between them is not entirely straightforward: a bank belonging to one of the enclosures has been found to overlie an earlier ring-ditch, a circular earthwork that typically marks a prehistoric burial or ritual monument. That sequence, one feature burying another, is a small but telling reminder that the land around Knowth was shaped and reshaped across a very long span of time, each generation working ground that earlier people had already marked out for their own purposes.