Aerial photographs reveal what the eye at field level struggles to piece together: low earthen banks tracing both oval and rectilinear enclosures, many of them still bearing the rippled texture of cultivation ridges, the long parallel furrows left by generations of spade or plough work on land that has long since returned to pasture.

The field system lies immediately to the east of the abbey at Kill, and the two features almost certainly share a history, the farmland serving the religious community whose remains still stand nearby. The cultivation ridges visible across many of the enclosures are a common feature of pre-modern Irish agriculture, created by repeatedly turning soil inward to improve drainage on wet or uneven ground. What makes this particular example quietly compelling is its scale and its legibility from above: the banks define fields of noticeably different shapes, suggesting the landscape was reorganised or added to over time rather than laid out in a single episode. The site was documented as part of an archaeological survey of the Ballinrobe district compiled by D. Lavelle for the Lough Mask and Lough Carra Tourist Development Association in 1994, which drew on aerial photography from the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography to map the extent and character of the remains.