What looks like ordinary farmland reveals itself, when crops are stressed by drought or dry spells, as a pattern of circular marks pressed into the grain. These cropmarks, picked up in aerial photographs taken in August 1995 and again in 1996, outline a ring-ditch of roughly five to ten metres in diameter. A ring-ditch is the circular trench left behind after a burial mound has been flattened or eroded away, the ditch having once defined the boundary of the monument above it.

This particular ring-ditch is not alone. Five such features were identified in close proximity to one another at Garryduff, and alongside them sits the trace of a plough-levelled barrow, a burial mound that has been gradually worn down to nothing by centuries of agricultural activity. Taken together, the cluster is understood to represent a prehistoric cemetery. Such groupings are not uncommon in the Irish landscape; communities during the Bronze Age in particular tended to inter their dead in defined areas, sometimes building upon or near existing monuments across generations. At Garryduff, the barrow and its surrounding ring-ditches appear to be the remnants of exactly this kind of accumulated, long-used burial ground, now compressed beneath the soil into nothing more legible than a stain in a crop.