The tenant farmer working the land had no knowledge of it either. What they were searching for had been marked on an Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a small circular mound, and yet on the ground it had apparently dissolved into the surrounding countryside of gently undulating pasture and poor drainage. That kind of quiet disappearance is not unusual for prehistoric earthworks, but what makes this particular site stranger still is that even when it was being examined, nobody could quite agree on what it was.

The oldest detailed account on record, from March 1973, describes a substantial earthen ring enclosing a saucer-shaped depression, completely overgrown with furze and briars, with no visible entrance and no fosse, the ditch that typically runs around a burial mound. The inspector at the time suspected the feature might originally have been a solid mound that was later dug into at the centre, with the excavated material thrown outward, creating the misleading appearance of a ring. A separate, undated account raises a more deflating possibility: that the whole thing may not be prehistoric at all, but the remains of a relatively recent house-site, reshaped by time and weathering until it looked like something more ancient. A third account, working from measurements of roughly two metres in height, argued for a disturbed bowl barrow, a rounded burial mound of the kind raised over the dead during the Bronze Age. That classification was subsequently rejected on the grounds that a true bowl barrow would normally be surrounded by a ditch, and none is present. The current consensus, such as it is, leans towards a ransacked mound barrow, one that was at some point dug into, likely by people searching for whatever burial goods might lie within, leaving the hollowed and overgrown form that confused everyone who came after.