It is, in fact, a ring barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument in which a central area is enclosed by a circular ditch, known as a fosse, with an outer bank of piled earth beyond it. This particular example measures eleven metres across, its fosse originally cut to three metres wide and nearly one and a half metres deep, with a bank on the outside still standing over a metre high in places, though now partly lost under bushes and briars.

When archaeologist Jane O'Shaughnessy excavated part of the interior and the north-eastern quadrant in 1991, the results were quietly puzzling. A trench revealed an arc of large, haphazardly-set stones, apparently forming part of a subcircular enclosure roughly four and a half metres in diameter, though the full extent of this stone setting ran beyond the edge of the excavation. No artefacts were recovered, and no evidence for burial was found, which is an unusual outcome for a monument of this class. More revealing was a small feature uncovered beneath the outer edge of the bank: a circular concentration, half a metre across, of angular heat-shattered stones set in dark, charcoal-rich soil. This hearth-like deposit had been sealed in place when the bank was originally constructed. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal from this feature returned a date of 3175 plus or minus 46 years before present, placing activity at the site somewhere in the Bronze Age, roughly the mid-second millennium BC. The primary core of the bank itself appeared to have been built some two and a half metres outside the edge of the fosse, a detail that hints at a more deliberate sequence of construction than the modest scale of the monument might suggest.