Centuries of ploughing have levelled them to the point where they leave no trace above ground, and only from the air do they reveal themselves, as cropmarks, the faint differential growth patterns in cereal crops that betray buried features beneath the soil.

The site came to light through an aerial photograph taken on 13 July 1989, which captured two circular cropmarks in the same field. A barrow is a burial mound, typically from the Bronze Age, raised over one or more interments and often enclosed by a surrounding ditch; when such a mound has been ploughed flat over generations, the buried ditch can still influence drainage and soil composition enough to affect how crops grow directly above it. The larger of the two features here is classified as a circular enclosure, almost certainly the ghost of one such mound. The smaller, approximately twelve metres in diameter, sits adjacent and appears to share a common outer bank with the first, the two features interlinked in a way that suggests they may have been conceived or used together. The same field contains traces of a rectilinear field system defined by fosses, long ditches used to demarcate land boundaries, though whether this system is contemporary with the barrows or belongs to a different period entirely is not established. A river runs roughly ninety metres to the east before joining the River Nore, placing these monuments in a low-lying landscape that would have had significance for communities long before Kilkenny city took shape around its medieval core.