What emerged during topsoil stripping behind the Riverrun House was not the kind of monument that announces itself above ground; it was a curved V-shaped ditch, the subterranean outline of a funerary monument that had long since lost whatever mound or surface structure once marked its presence in the landscape.

The site was identified by Ken Hanley and subsequently partially excavated by Paul Stevens in November 1998. The ditch measured 2.8 metres wide and 0.75 metres deep, running from the northeast through south to southwest and enclosing an area approximately 40 metres in diameter. A ditch barrow of this type, sometimes called a ring-ditch, is the remnant of a prehistoric burial enclosure, typically a circular earthwork in which cremated remains were interred at the centre. The fill of the ditch here contained a layer of charcoal alongside a single small fragment of cremated bone, a trace that is modest in scale but significant in what it implies. A second ditch feature was also found abutting the larger one to the east, possibly contemporary with it, though the partial nature of the excavation left that question open. The surrounding countryside already had a churchyard to the northwest, a much later sacred use of land that, perhaps by chance, sits not far from this far older burial ground on the floodplains of a small river running to the west.