The only reason we know it exists is a single aerial photograph taken on 16 July 1971, when the angle of light and the state of the crops conspired to throw the buried feature into relief. What the photograph revealed was not one anomaly but many, a loose alignment of at least fourteen ring-ditches strung across the landscape between two rivers.

A ring-ditch is typically the last faint trace of a prehistoric burial monument, most often a round barrow whose central mound has long since been ploughed flat. What survives underground is the circular trench that once defined the outer edge of the monument, detectable from the air because the disturbed soil within it retains moisture differently from the ground on either side, causing the grass or grain above to grow in a subtly different colour or at a subtly different rate. The Jenkinstown example sits on a gently sloping terrace midway between the River Nore to the east and the Dinin River to the west, both of which converge roughly two kilometres to the south. This kind of well-drained but water-adjacent ground, with open views in most directions, is exactly where prehistoric communities tended to bury and commemorate their dead. The fact that this particular ring-ditch belongs to a cluster of at least fourteen, aligned roughly northwest to southeast, suggests the area was used as a organised funerary landscape rather than a single isolated burial site.