No mound, no marker, no obvious break in the soil alerts a passing visitor to what is underneath. The only way this cluster of ancient monuments came to light was from the air, when aerial photography in August 1995 and again in 1996 captured cropmarks, the faint differential patterns in growing crops that betray buried features below the surface, revealing the outline of a ring-ditch roughly ten metres in diameter.

A ring-ditch is the circular trench that once surrounded a burial mound or cairn, the outer boundary of a monument whose central mass has long since been levelled or eroded away. What makes Garryduff particularly significant is that this feature does not stand alone. It is one of five ring-ditches identified in close proximity to one another, and the group sits approximately seventy metres west of a plough-levelled barrow, a burial mound that has been gradually flattened by centuries of agricultural activity. Taken together, the barrow and the ring-ditches form an assemblage interpreted as a prehistoric cemetery, a concentration of funerary monuments that would once have been a meaningful and perhaps prominent feature of the local landscape. The work of identifying and recording these features was carried out by Dr. Gillian Barrett and Jean Farrelly.

Nothing of this cemetery is visible to someone walking the field today. The land continues to be farmed, and the monuments survive only as cropmarks on archived aerial photographs and as subsurface traces in the earth. That invisibility is in some ways the most thought-provoking thing about the site: an entire burial ground, potentially spanning generations of prehistoric use, persisting quietly beneath ordinary farmland in the Kilkenny countryside.