Across the hillside, long parallel ridges rise gently from the earth, the remnants of a cultivation method known as lazy beds, or in Irish, iomairí. These were not beds for the idle; the name is thought to derive from a misreading of the Irish, and the technique was in fact demanding work. Spade-dug ridges were raised to improve drainage and concentrate soil depth, allowing crops, most commonly potatoes, to be grown on land that might otherwise have been marginal or waterlogged. The ridges at Na Millíní are a scheduled archaeological monument, which means the landscape here has been formally recognised as carrying historical significance worth protecting.

Cultivation ridges of this kind are found across Ireland, but they carry particular weight in a Munster context. Many surviving examples date from the period before the Great Famine of the 1840s, when potato cultivation had expanded onto poorer upland and boggy ground to feed a rapidly growing rural population. When that system collapsed, the land was often simply abandoned, and the ridges were left in place, gradually softening under grass and heather but never quite disappearing. Their survival is, in an odd way, a consequence of the catastrophe itself; the people who made them were gone, and no later agricultural use came along to flatten what they had built. Walking across ground like this, the regular undulations underfoot are not natural contours but the imprint of a specific way of life, preserved by absence.