It exists, to all practical purposes, only from the air. A ring-ditch roughly fifteen metres in diameter reveals itself as a cropmark, the buried circular ditch causing the vegetation above it to grow at a slightly different rate or colour than the surrounding soil, producing a ghostly outline that becomes legible only when viewed from altitude under the right conditions of drought and angle.

Cropmarks of this kind are a recurring phenomenon in Irish aerial archaeology. A ring-ditch is the remnant of a circular ditch, often all that survives of a Bronze Age burial mound after centuries of ploughing have levelled the earthwork above it. The central area may once have held a burial, though without excavation it is impossible to say with certainty what lies beneath. What makes the Oldtown example quietly interesting is its company: two further ring-ditches sit approximately 190 metres to the north, suggesting that this corner of Kilkenny was, at some point in prehistory, a place people returned to repeatedly for burial or ritual. The trio was captured in an aerial photograph taken in July 1989, the image preserving in a single frame something that the ground itself no longer shows.