They show up in the ground as shallow ring ditches, the kind of low, circular earthwork that can indicate a barrow, the burial mound type used across prehistoric and early medieval Ireland, though in this case they might equally be the ghostly impressions of old circular feeding troughs. The uncertainty is genuine, and it sits at the centre of a much larger puzzle about what this landscape once was.

The mounds are part of a broader cluster of earthworks extending eastward from a graveyard wall, with a fortified church about 130 metres to the west and a motte and bailey, the raised earthwork platform characteristic of early Norman castle-building, roughly 200 metres to the south-west. Aerial photographs taken in 1967 and 1971 captured these features clearly, suggesting a settlement of some complexity. Researchers working from those photographs and from a digital terrain model produced before 1999 identified the earthworks as possibly representing the remains of a deserted medieval village. Then, during the redevelopment of a stud farm in 1999, the earthworks were partially buried under topsoil to make the ground safe for livestock. The act was practical and unremarkable in itself, but it effectively obscured features that had survived, in some form, for centuries. O'Donovan and Duffy, writing in 2003, noted the three circular mounds specifically, and their careful hedging, barrows or feeding troughs, captures exactly the difficulty of reading a landscape that has been grazed, farmed, and quietly altered over a very long time.