What looks at first like a slight unevenness in the land turns out, on closer inspection, to be the remains of a barrow-cemetery, a cluster of prehistoric funerary mounds where the dead were once interred beneath raised earthen platforms encircled by ditches. Seven such barrows were recorded here at Lakill and Moortown, and six of them retain at least some trace above ground. The seventh has vanished entirely into the surrounding farmland.

A ditch barrow is a relatively straightforward type of prehistoric monument: a low central mound, typically covering a burial, set within a circular ditch that was originally dug to define and perhaps ritually separate the burial space. At Lakill and Moortown, the particular barrow examined in detail during a 2015 survey by David McGuinness offers a good illustration of how drastically time and land use can reduce these structures. The central mound or platform measured roughly seven metres across, surrounded by a ditch bringing the overall diameter to just over ten metres. The ditch itself dropped only about 0.4 metres below the top of the mound at its deepest point, and 0.35 metres below the external ground level on the eastern side. Any outer bank that may once have existed has left no trace on the surface, which McGuinness noted is unsurprising given how thoroughly the site has been flattened over the centuries. The monument sits on land that slopes down from southeast to northwest, and lies in close proximity to two neighbouring barrows, one just over ten metres to the southeast and another only three metres away, suggesting this was once a deliberately concentrated place of burial rather than a scattering of isolated mounds.