It measures roughly 110 metres by 22 metres, enclosed by wide earthen banks standing between 1.6 and 2 metres high, with the flat central floor dropping about 3.5 metres below the top of those banks. The name raises an immediate question, because this is not a natural feature and it is not, by any obvious logic, a pond in the conventional sense. Its geometry is too deliberate, its banks too precisely formed.

The structure was recorded in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1986 as a fish pond, which offers one plausible interpretation. Formal fish ponds, sometimes called stew ponds, were a common feature of designed estate landscapes in Ireland and Britain from the medieval period onwards, used to keep live fish, particularly carp and pike, close at hand for the table. The rectangular form and raised containment banks are consistent with that purpose. What is particularly interesting here is the setting: the pond sits on the ridge line with a steep fall to the west, and it is part of a cluster of designed landscape features, with other recorded elements lying within roughly 110 metres in either direction. Whatever this place once was, it was not incidental; it belonged to a deliberate arrangement of the land around it. The name Lead pond, fixed in print on the nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey, hints at an older local identity that the cartographers simply transcribed without explanation, and that explanation, for now, has not survived.