Running in a series of parallel ridges from east to west across the interior of the site, these raised cultivation beds are the kind of feature that can be easy to walk across without quite registering what you are looking at. They are the remnants of a farming system once widespread across Ireland, where soil was mounded into long narrow strips to improve drainage and allow crops to grow in ground that would otherwise be too wet or too poor to work.

Cultivation ridges of this type, sometimes called lazy beds, appear across the Irish landscape in varying states of preservation. They are most commonly associated with the intensive tillage that preceded and accompanied the Great Famine of the 1840s, though in many areas the practice is considerably older. The particular ridges at Drom Na Coille, on the Iveragh Peninsula in South Kerry, run along an east to west axis, a detail that may reflect the local topography or the angle at which light and drainage were best managed on this particular ground. The Iveragh Peninsula, a rugged sweep of mountain and coast in the southwest of the country, holds an unusually dense record of human activity across many centuries, and these ridges form one small part of that accumulation.