Spotted on aerial photography taken in November 2011, they occupy ground that was once a managed deerpark, threaded with tree groves and old pathways. Whether they were made thousands of years ago or laid out by an eighteenth-century estate designer is a question that has not yet been answered, and that unresolved quality is part of what makes them interesting.

The earthworks lie within what was the post-1700 deerpark of Killua Castle, the castle itself sitting roughly 570 metres to the north-north-east. The most straightforward explanation is that they are prehistoric barrows, the word referring to rounded burial mounds typically raised over the dead during the Bronze Age or earlier, which were later absorbed into the estate's landscaped grounds and given a secondary decorative purpose. That kind of reuse was not unusual; a great many prehistoric features were tidied up, reshaped, or simply left in place as picturesque incidents within Georgian demesne design. The alternative reading, however, is that the earthworks have no prehistoric origin at all and were constructed entirely as part of the same post-1700 landscaping campaign that produced the formal pathway visible on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of the area. A monument of uncertain character was also erected on the demesne around the same period, roughly 270 metres to the north-north-east. A nearby ringfort, a separate unrelated site, sits just 90 metres to the north. The 1837 edition of the same Ordnance Survey map identifies an older deerpark belonging to the castle about 650 metres to the south, which suggests the landscape around Killua was reorganised and expanded at some point after 1700, with new ground taken in and planted.

For anyone walking the area, the earthworks are subtle features rather than dramatic mounds, and their true significance, if prehistoric, lies as much in their grouping and alignment as in any individual example. The surrounding demesne retains traces of the designed landscape described on those early maps, and the proximity of the ringfort adds a further layer to a stretch of Westmeath ground that has clearly been shaped by human hands across very different periods.