A ring barrow sits here, so thoroughly worn down by time and agriculture that its circular outline measures just four and a half metres across, its enclosing ditch barely six centimetres deep. Without the trained eye of a fieldworker, it would pass for an unremarkable patch of grass.

Ring barrows are prehistoric funerary monuments, typically consisting of a low burial mound enclosed by a circular ditch and an outer bank. They belong broadly to the Bronze Age tradition of the dead being marked and separated from the living landscape by earthen boundaries, however modest. The example at Barnanalleen fits that modest end of the spectrum entirely. Its surrounding fosse, a shallow ditch cut into the ground, is just over a metre and a half wide and scarcely noticeable underfoot. What may once have been a low bank encircling the outside has been largely levelled, leaving only faint traces in the profile of the soil, with an external height of roughly thirteen centimetres at its best-preserved point. The interior is flat and low, offering no obvious indication of what, if anything, was ever interred there.