Visible from above as crisp, rounded cropmarks, they have the outward appearance of ring-barrows, the low burial mounds ringed by a ditch that were a common feature of the Irish prehistoric landscape. One of the trio measures roughly eleven metres in diameter, defined by a fosse (a shallow encircling ditch) and faint traces of an outer bank. Two further possible examples lie close by, one immediately to the north and another about fifteen metres to the north-east.

What makes this site genuinely unusual is not what it might be, but the uncertainty surrounding what it actually is. The sharpness and regularity of the cropmarks, combined with their proximity to Ballinapark House, has led researchers to consider whether these features are prehistoric at all. They may instead be designed landscape elements associated with the house and its grounds, constructed after 1700 as part of a formal or ornamental layout. A more prosaic possibility has also been raised: that the circular forms were created by livestock ring-feeders, the kind of circular structure used to distribute fodder to cattle in a field. Neither explanation has been confirmed, and the antiquity of the earthworks remains an open question. The site was identified through aerial imagery, including Google Earth orthoimages from 2009 and Digital Globe photography from 2011 to 2013, which picked out the cropmarks with unusual clarity.