At Stripe, a fragmentary network of ancient field walls survives inside the grid of modern enclosures, visible not as upstanding stonework but as low, sod-covered rises and broken lines of individual stones pushing up through grassy hummocks. What makes the arrangement quietly telling is its orientation: the older walls run on a NE-SW and NW-SE axis, cutting across the neat north-south and east-west lines of the modern field boundaries that now surround them. The two systems exist in the same ground but belong to entirely different moments in the organisation of land.

The date of the older walls is not known. They define a patchwork of rectangular, sub-rectangular, and irregularly shaped plots, ranging from around fifteen to fifty metres at their widest, with occasional smaller sub-divisions of five to ten metres, suggesting a working agricultural landscape that was subdivided for different purposes at different scales. Scattered across the area are small field clearance cairns, low piles of stone gathered from the soil to make cultivation easier, a detail that implies sustained, careful use of the land rather than a passing settlement. The terrain around the field system adds to the sense of a place that has shifted considerably over time. A turlough, a seasonally flooding lake of the kind common in karst landscapes across the west of Ireland, called Stripe Lough, is recorded near the southern end of the area on the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map but had vanished from the 1919 edition entirely. Boggy, heather-covered ground stretches away to the north and south, and a stream runs along the eastern boundary. Within and around the field system, there are also traces of a possible house, a mound, an enclosure, and a possible cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort, suggesting that whoever farmed these plots also lived among them.