Twelve antler picks, tools used for digging in the prehistoric period, had been placed with apparent intention along the southern arc of the ditch, alongside small quantities of burnt bone and charcoal. The ditch itself was not continuous; a gap of about two and a quarter metres on the western side was left undug, forming what archaeologists call a causeway, an unbroken crossing point that would have controlled or ritualised entry into the interior.

The site at Holdenstown came to light during excavation in 2007, carried out ahead of road improvements along the N9/N10 Kilcullen to Waterford route. What emerged was not a single monument but a cluster of them, all sitting within a larger ditched enclosure on the same elevated ground. Three ring-ditches, the circular burial or ceremonial features that are the characteristic remains of Bronze Age funerary activity, were excavated within the enclosure. A fourth, spotted on aerial photography as far back as 1989, lies just outside the excavated area to the northwest and was not disturbed. One of the smaller ring-ditches contained five inhumation burials, the remains of individuals interred in the ground rather than cremated, and further burials were found within the enclosure more broadly. Later activity left its mark too: two post-medieval linear features cut across the main ring-ditch on a northeast to southwest alignment, evidence that the landscape continued to be worked and altered long after the original monument had ceased to be understood as such.

The grouping of ring-ditches within a shared enclosure, each of slightly different scale, suggests a site that accumulated meaning over time rather than being laid out in a single episode. The deliberate placement of the antler picks at the southern edge of the principal ditch, rather than scattered through the fill, points to a closing or dedicatory act of some kind, though its precise significance remains, as with so much of this period, beyond recovery.