Each mound ran roughly eight metres long and less than a metre wide, set about eight and a half metres apart, and between them lay a rough surface of mortar and stone. They were not dramatic features, but they were deliberate ones.

The mounds came to light during archaeological assessment work connected to the proposed improvement of the N8 road, a scheme that ran for approximately forty kilometres between Cullahill in County Laois and Cashel in County Tipperary. Test-trenching in the area, reported by Moriarty in 2008, revealed that the southern mound was the base of a crudely made wall, constructed with mud-bonded stone rather than lime mortar, and subsequently sealed beneath topsoil over an unknown period. What the structure actually was, however, remained unresolved. Archaeologists suggested it could represent the badly degraded remnant of a vernacular building, the kind of modest, locally built structure common to rural Ireland across many centuries, or possibly the boundary of a disused laneway. No artefacts were recovered to help settle the question. A follow-up excavation in 2006, carried out by Hardy and Green, found no surviving structural remains or archaeological features at all. The one exception was a single worked flint knife of plano-convex form, a type shaped by pressure-flaking to produce a curved upper face and a flat underside, recovered from the topsoil. It was isolated, with no associated material, and its presence raises more questions than it answers about the depth of human activity at this quiet spot along the stream.