The name most likely refers to a ditch uncovered during excavation, a modest earthwork that nonetheless hints at a settlement that once occupied this hillside and was later abandoned, leaving only subtle traces in the ground. The field itself is deceptively ordinary. Its present large extent is relatively recent, the result of smaller parcels being merged after boundary removals over the past 170 years or so, and a substantial sand quarry has already eaten away much of the hill's centre. What remains is a landscape quietly layered with occupation, from probable prehistoric activity near the hilltop to medieval settlement and later farming.

In April 2002, test excavations were carried out here as part of an assessment connected to a proposed Wicklow Port Access Road, which would pass close to a protected early ecclesiastical site nearby. Four trenches were opened across the slope, guided by geophysical survey and low-relief earthwork features visible on the hillside, including an old trackway surviving as a hollow way, a disused field boundary with an infilled fosse on either side, and a platform levelled into the slope. Lazy-bed cultivation ridges, the long narrow mounds left by hand-dug potato or crop cultivation, were also identified in the western part of the field. Trenches 1 and 3 produced the most significant finds: pits, ditches, a charcoal-flecked spread, and fragments of pottery and bone of probable medieval date, material consistent with a small rural settlement that was eventually deserted. A second geophysical survey subsequently confirmed the likely eastern and southern limits of these medieval deposits.

The site's story does not stop with the medieval period. Scattered finds from the topsoil, between 35 and 70 centimetres deep, point to a surge of farming activity in the mid to late eighteenth century, possibly intensive manuring of the land, along with ploughmarks and a trackway that may date from the same era. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, ceramic field drains were laid through the area as part of a water management programme, cutting across the earlier deposits. Each phase of use has left its mark at a slightly different depth, so that the field's soil amounts to an accidental archive running from prehistoric flints down through medieval occupation layers to modern drainage pipes, all beneath a surface that, to the passing eye, looks like nothing more than an ordinary hillside field outside a coastal county town.