The system is modest in scale, roughly 80 metres east to west and 50 metres north to south, and is divided into three subrectangular subdivisions with what appear to be additional enclosures attached. What makes it quietly arresting is not its size but its context: this is one of several discrete field systems nested within a much larger parent system, together extending over a kilometre between the Caher River and Murrooghkilly hill. That the whole complex has survived at all owes something to the fact that the ground was never brought back into agricultural use.

Field systems of this kind, characterised by low earthen or stone boundaries dividing land into working plots, are a common feature of the Irish countryside, yet most have been absorbed, levelled, or built over across centuries of farming. Where they persist in unreclaimed upland or marginal terrain, they can preserve the outline of land management practices that predate any documentary record, sometimes by a considerable distance. The Murrooghkilly system came to wider attention relatively recently; it was identified on Digital Globe satellite imagery taken between 2011 and 2013, and subsequently reported to the National Monuments Service by Ros Ó Maoldúin. The survival of so extensive a complex in this part of Clare, between a river and a hillside, suggests the land here was worked with some organisation at one point, then simply abandoned to the grass.