They are easy to walk past without registering what they are, which is part of what makes them worth pausing over. These are not hedgerows or drainage works but the remnants of an ancient agricultural landscape, a pattern of land division that has survived, largely by accident, because the ground itself has not been dramatically disturbed.

The field system lies to the north and west of a cashel, a type of circular stone enclosure typical of early medieval Ireland, built as a fortified farmstead or settlement and here recorded separately as MA118-073. The relationship between the two features is the telling detail: some of the earthen field banks adjoin the cashel wall directly, suggesting that the fields and the enclosure were conceived together, or at least grew up in close association over time. This kind of integrated settlement and farming layout, where the living space and the worked land form a single coherent unit, gives a sense of how people organised their immediate world at a very local scale. The fields are small, which is characteristic of pre-modern agricultural practice in Ireland, where plots were worked intensively rather than extensively, often by a single family and their animals.