At roughly 52 feet across and enclosed by a shallow, round-bottomed fosse (a ditch cut into the earth, in this case only a foot deep and three feet wide), the ring barrow looks modest enough. What lies beneath, however, is a layered record of human activity spanning different periods and purposes, each generation making use of, and altering, what the previous one had left behind.

The site was excavated in 1948 by M. J. O'Kelly, whose findings were published in 1952. Beneath the mound he found pits, stake-holes, charcoal spreads, and fragments of a human skull, along with pottery that he initially classified as Neolithic, placing the monument's origins in the period before 2500 BC. Subsequent researchers, however, re-examined the evidence. A study by Brindley and colleagues, published in 1987 and 1988, proposed that the pottery was more correctly identified as Beaker ware, associated with a later prehistoric culture that spread across Atlantic Europe in the third millennium BC. Two radiocarbon dates from the site supported this revised reading. The reinterpretation reshuffled the entire sequence. Rather than a single Neolithic monument with later additions, the picture that emerged was of a short-term settlement with Beaker pottery and pits as a first phase; then the construction of a multiple cist cairn, a burial monument built of stone-lined graves, accompanied by a food vessel burial to the south-west; and finally a reuse of the cist and a modification of the cairn, which was enclosed by the fosse. That fosse was subsequently extended outward to take in an urn burial, a cremation interred in a ceramic vessel, which had been placed just outside the original boundary. What began as a place people briefly occupied became, in stages, a place they buried their dead, and then a place they kept returning to, reshaping as they went.