The field system at Scarteen stretches roughly 700 metres north to south and 1,300 metres east to west, a scale that makes it easy to underestimate at ground level, where the walls themselves survive to little more than one or two courses of stone, protruding just above the surface of the peat. Their curvilinear lines are the giveaway that this is not the work of post-medieval improvers laying out straight-edged farms; these boundaries follow older, more organic rhythms, and where two walls meet, the corners are often closed off to form small enclosures within enclosures. An aerial photograph taken in 1973 captured the full extent of the layout, revealing fields of varying shapes and sizes that are simply not legible from the ground.

What makes Scarteen more than a ruined boundary system is the sheer density of activity preserved alongside those walls. Scattered throughout the complex are twelve confirmed hut sites, three possible ones, ten enclosures, and a cairn. There are also at least four fulachtaí fia, with two further probable examples. Fulachtaí fia are ancient cooking sites, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone beside a trough, and they are among the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland, generally associated with the Bronze Age. Finding several of them within a single field system, alongside hut sites and enclosures, suggests this was not merely farmed land but a lived-in landscape, one where people cooked, sheltered, and organised their surroundings in ways that left a recoverable imprint beneath the bog. The walls themselves, only about 0.6 metres wide and 0.4 metres high where they survive, would have been modest even when new; their persistence is a function of the bog that buried and, in doing so, preserved them.