Field systems are among the oldest legible marks that people left on the Irish countryside: networks of banks, walls, and ditches that once divided the ground into workable plots, sometimes stretching back to the Bronze Age or earlier. They are not dramatic ruins but they are, in their quiet way, among the most direct connections to the daily working lives of past communities.

Dumha Éige, whose name carries the Irish word for a mound or burial cairn, sits in a part of Mayo with a long history of human settlement, and field systems in the west of Ireland have in some cases been preserved beneath layers of blanket bog for thousands of years, sheltered from the plough and from later development. The most celebrated example of this kind of survival is the Céide Fields in north Mayo, where a Neolithic field system was found intact beneath the peat, but comparable remains, less extensively studied and far less visited, are scattered across the county. The particular character of the Dumha Éige field system, its age, extent, and construction, remains to be fully documented in the public record.