Karst is the term for a landscape formed by the dissolution of soluble rock over millennia, producing the bare, fissured pavements that define the Burren, and it is exactly this kind of terrain that the field system occupies. The arrangement is roughly 190 metres along its north-south axis and around 320 metres from north-east to south-west, sitting immediately to the north and west of a separate enclosure. What makes it quietly arresting is not any single dramatic feature but the cumulative strangeness of agricultural organisation imposed on such austere, rocky ground.

The field system at Poulaphuca is not an isolated remnant. It forms part of a considerably larger network of field boundaries that extends along the Burren uplands from Poulbaun in the north down to Rannagh West in the south, suggesting that at some point this bleak limestone plateau supported a degree of organised land use across a substantial area. The Poulaphuca system was noted by Ros Ó Maoldúin and became visible through aerial imagery, including Digital Globe coverage from 2011 to 2013 and OSi Aerial Premium imagery from 2012 to 2018, the kind of remote sensing that has transformed understanding of how densely the Irish landscape was once worked and divided. Field systems of this type are notoriously difficult to date without excavation, but their presence alongside enclosures suggests long periods of habitation and land management in areas that modern eyes tend to read as wilderness.