They give no sign of their presence: no mounds, no stones, no earthworks. The only way they have ever been seen is from the air, captured in a series of aerial photographs taken in 1966, in which the buried ditches show up as circular cropmarks, darker or lighter rings pressed into the growing vegetation by the soil disturbances left behind by prehistoric construction.

A ditch-barrow is, broadly speaking, a burial monument defined by a surrounding circular ditch rather than a raised outer bank. Where a classic ring-barrow would show both a ditch and an enclosing earthen bank, these features at Lisduff lack any clear evidence of the bank, which is why they have been classified differently. The group of at least ten, arranged in a roughly linear pattern and varying in size, almost certainly date to prehistory, and the largest of them sits at the north-eastern end of the alignment. The land they occupy was originally marshy ground beside the Munster river to the south-east, and the drainage and reclamation that transformed it into serviceable pasture likely completed the destruction of whatever surface features once existed. Cropmarks visible in the 1966 photographs also suggest the remnants of a field system to the west of the barrow group, with further isolated ditch lines to the south and east, hinting that this was once a more structured, inhabited landscape than the open fields suggest today.