The banks and silted trenches here do not align with the modern fields that cover them. They run according to an older logic, one that predates the current pattern of enclosures and answers instead to a set of ring-forts, the circular earthwork enclosures common across early medieval Ireland, that still dot the hillside. The ancient boundaries stop respectfully at the edges of those ring-forts, or cut into their fosses, the defensive ditches surrounding them, while the modern field walls pass straight across them without acknowledgement. Two entirely different systems of land division occupy the same ground, one largely invisible, one still in use.

The site sits on what was identified by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing between 1917 and 1919, as the supposed location of Temaír Erann, the ancient cemetery of the Ernai tribe. It is part of a broader and well-documented archaeological complex at Cush. The field system itself came to serious attention during excavations carried out by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin between 1934 and 1935. He found that the old fences consisted of a very low bank, typically around 0.45 metres above the original ground surface, running alongside a silted-up trench averaging roughly 0.91 metres in depth. In the western part of the site, trial cuttings revealed further trenches running east to west down the slope, entirely invisible at the surface. At one telling junction, red sandstone that had been cut from the bottom of a fosse belonging to a later enclosure had been thrown into one of the earlier field trenches, confirming that the field system came first. A further phase of test-trenching was carried out in 2002 by Avril Hayes, ahead of a single house development in the western quadrant, though that work did not produce additional finds of significance.

The field boundaries are not dramatically visible on the ground, and a casual walk across the pasture would give little away. The clearest evidence of the system's extent and geometry comes from aerial imagery: perpendicular linear banks and cropmarks are visible on Digital Globe and Google Earth orthoimages taken between 2011 and 2013, where differences in soil moisture and vegetation reveal what excavation confirmed below. For anyone visiting the broader Cush complex, it is worth knowing that what appears to be a straightforward hillside carries at least two distinct layers of territorial organisation, each ignoring the other, laid down at different moments in time.