The ground dips almost imperceptibly, the interior sitting slightly lower than the surrounding pasture, and a shallow fosse, roughly a metre and a half wide and only five centimetres deep, traces out an oval roughly five and a half metres north to south and six metres east to west. To a passing eye it reads as nothing more than a gentle irregularity in a grazed field. It was only through aerial photography that the feature was properly identified as a ring-ditch barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary or ceremonial monument in which a circular ditch once enclosed a central area, the earthwork now so eroded that its original form is largely a matter of interpretation.

What makes the site quietly interesting is its company. A ditch-barrow sits roughly seven metres to the west-southwest, and a ring-barrow, a related monument type in which a low central mound is encircled by a bank and ditch, lies about seventy-three metres to the northwest. The clustering of these features suggests that this part of Nickeres was, at some point in prehistory, a place set aside for the dead or for ritual, a small funerary landscape now absorbed into ordinary agricultural land. The Cork to Limerick Junction railway line runs approximately fifty metres to the southeast, which means that for well over a century, trains have passed within earshot of a site that predates them by thousands of years, with neither party much acknowledging the other.