The photograph taken on 22 July of that year captured a cropmark, the faint differential in how crops ripen over disturbed or compacted soil beneath them, that traced the arc of a ring-ditch invisible at ground level. Ring-ditches are the buried remnants of circular earthworks, often the ploughed-down remains of Bronze Age burial mounds, and they tend to appear this way, as ghostly outlines legible only from the air and only in the right season.

The cropmark at Holdenstown turned out to be one part of a more complex picture. A circular enclosure was identified immediately to the south, and when archaeologists excavated the site in 2007, they found three further ring-ditches contained within it. One of those inner ring-ditches held five inhumation burials, meaning the interred remains of individuals placed in the ground rather than cremated. Two additional inhumations and a possible cremation pit were also uncovered elsewhere within the enclosure. The clustering of burial types, inhumation alongside what may be a cremation deposit, points to a site used across different periods or by a community whose funerary practices were not uniform. The work was published by Whitty in 2009 and 2010, and represents the kind of excavation that quietly rewrites what a stretch of ordinary farmland actually is.