The feature is so slight that most people walking across it would notice nothing at all: a shallow fosse, or encircling ditch, roughly two and a half metres wide and only five centimetres deep, tracing out an oval just six metres north to south and five metres east to west. A ditch barrow is a funerary monument typically defined by this kind of encircling ditch rather than by a raised central mound, and the near-erasure of this particular example makes its survival, however marginal, quietly remarkable.

The ground it occupies has its own layered history. The barrow sits on elevated land along the eastern and south-eastern edge of what was once a lake, drained during engineering works carried out sometime in the 1870s or 1880s. That drainage transformed the local landscape considerably, exposing and altering ground that had previously flanked open water, possibly for millennia. The monument was formally identified during a field survey conducted by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly on 28 November 2008, and it does not stand entirely alone: a second ditch barrow and a ring-barrow, a related class of monument also defined by a surrounding ditch but sometimes retaining a low internal mound, lie approximately 26 metres and 56 metres respectively to the north-east. The clustering of these features suggests this elevated ground held some significance in the prehistoric period, even if the precise nature of that significance has long since dissolved into the pasture.