When inspectors arrived in 1997, they found something rather more ambiguous: not a burial mound or an earthwork of ancient origin, but the remains of a designed landscape feature, its outline softened by decades of agricultural tidying. Farmers clearing nearby fields had heaped stones onto it over the years, quietly burying whatever original form it once had beneath the practical detritus of working land.

The earliest detailed mapping of the area, the Ordnance Survey six-inch sheet from 1838, shows no trace of it at all. By the time of the 1922 edition, however, it appears as a roughly oblong enclosed area, oriented northeast to southwest and measuring somewhere between 75 and 80 metres along that axis, with a width of roughly 35 to 40 metres. It was planted with trees at that point, which is itself a clue to its original purpose. Designed landscape features of this kind, ornamental plantings or garden elements set within otherwise agricultural ground, were a common enough fixture on the estates and improved farmlands of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whatever household or landholding it once served, the planting has long since gone, and the stones have taken over.