This particular mound, catalogued as Barrow III, is a ring barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument in which a central burial mound is encircled by a ditch and an outer earthen bank. What makes this one quietly compelling is what a preliminary excavation in 1973 revealed beneath that unassuming surface: the buried architecture of a Bronze Age ritual landscape, preserved under centuries of accumulated soil.

The excavation, reported by McCabe in 1974, was limited to a single cutting in the north-east quadrant of the mound, yet even that restricted investigation produced a striking picture. At the centre of the mound, excavators found a pit containing many fragments of cremated human bone. Beneath the mound itself, resting on the original ground surface, were two curved arcs of weathered grey-white limestone, possibly the remains of two concentric stone rings set 1.20 metres and 3.80 metres from the centre. The stones, averaging around 30 centimetres in each dimension, were spaced with small gaps between them, and the area between the two arcs contained a concentration of smaller stones and scattered charcoal. The surrounding ditch, which is between seven and eight metres wide at the top, was found to have been approximately 2.60 metres deep when first cut. Not everything uncovered belonged to prehistory: cultivation ridges crossing the outer bank included one that produced a nineteenth-century clay pipe bowl, a small sign of the farmland this burial ground eventually became. Waste flint flakes were recovered, but no finished tools or ornaments. The excavators noted that the buried soil layers and ditch fill held significant potential for ecological analysis, a promise that, as far as the published record goes, has not yet been fully pursued.