The ring came to light not through any deliberate excavation but when a field bank was being constructed around the fosse of a nearby motte, the defensive ditch encircling a raised earthen mound of the kind built by Anglo-Norman settlers from the late eleventh century onwards. In disturbing the ground, the bank-makers also disturbed a midden, the accumulated refuse heap of an earlier occupation, a layered deposit of discarded bone, shell, ash, and domestic debris that archaeologists treat as one of the more informative traces of how people actually lived rather than how they built or fought.

The account comes from Kinahan, writing between 1879 and 1888, who noted the midden's position at the south-west of the fosse or in the area immediately adjacent to it. Whether the gold ring was preserved, sold, melted down, or simply passed into local legend without further documentation, the record does not say. It was "reputedly" discovered, which is the careful word of someone writing a generation or more after the event and relying on what people remembered rather than what anyone recorded at the time. The area has since been quarried, removing whatever physical traces may have remained.