What they would be crossing, however, is a ring barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument in which a burial, or sometimes several burials, was placed within a low circular bank and surrounding ditch. This one measures roughly four metres across, enclosed by a shallow fosse, that is a ditch, only about twenty centimetres deep, with an external bank that has been reduced to little more than a ripple in the turf, standing just ten centimetres high.

The monument sits in pasture on the crest of a hill, which is entirely typical of how these structures were positioned. Prehistoric communities across Ireland and Britain consistently chose elevated ground for their burial monuments, a pattern that may reflect a desire to place the dead closer to the sky, or simply to make the site visible across the landscape. Ring barrows of this kind are generally associated with the Bronze Age, though some date to the Iron Age, and they appear throughout Ireland in varying states of preservation. This particular example, small and almost entirely flattened, represents the less dramatic end of the spectrum, the kind of site that survives not through any special protection but simply because it happened to lie in a field rather than in the path of a plough or a road.