The field system at Murrooghkilly measures roughly 200 metres along its north-west to south-east axis and about 185 metres across, making it a substantial arrangement of enclosures that most passers-by would struggle to read as anything other than the ordinary chaos of stone and scrub. What makes it quietly remarkable is its layered character: the walls and boundaries here appear to belong to more than one period, with possible prehistoric and medieval elements folded into the same landscape, one era's divisions repurposing or cutting across another's.

Field systems of this kind, sometimes called co-axial or ladder systems depending on their layout, represent some of the most durable marks human communities have left on the Irish countryside. At Murrooghkilly, the boundaries form part of a considerably larger complex running through the Caher River valley, a valley in the Burren region of Clare already known for its unusual concentration of early settlement traces. The Burren's thin limestone soils, which seem inhospitable at first glance, actually drain well and produce winter grazing that communities valued from the Neolithic period onward, which helps explain why successive generations continued to divide and rework the same ground. The Murrooghkilly system was reported to the National Monuments Service by Ros Ó Maoldúin, and its extent and complexity became clearer through satellite imagery rather than ground survey alone, a reminder that some of the most significant archaeological patterns only become legible from altitude.