No earthworks break the surface, no stones mark the ground. What gives these features away is the crop itself: in dry summers, the soil above buried ditches retains moisture differently from the surrounding earth, and the plants above them grow fractionally taller or ripen at a slightly different rate, tracing out rings that only become legible from the air.

This particular ring-ditch, one of several in the same field, first appeared in aerial photographs taken by the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography in 1971, with follow-up flights in 1973 capturing further examples nearby. A later photograph from July 1989 confirmed the cropmark again. Ring-ditches of this kind are generally understood to be the ploughed-down remains of prehistoric burial mounds, the circular trench that once defined the outer edge of a barrow surviving below ground long after the central mound has been levelled by centuries of cultivation. Several such features clustered in a single field, as they are here at Foulksrath, can suggest a prehistoric funerary landscape, a place that was returned to for burial over generations, though the dating and purpose of any individual example can only be confirmed through excavation.