What makes them quietly puzzling is not what they are, but what they might not be. Despite the suggestive geometry, there is nothing to indicate that these are burial mounds or any other recognisable archaeological feature. They simply sit there, ambiguous and untidy, resisting easy classification.

The mounds first came to wider attention through aerial photography taken in October 1973, which revealed the full extent of the complex: four oblong, roughly rectangular mounds and three roughly square ones, all contained within the oval enclosure. The rectangular mounds reach approximate dimensions of 28 metres northwest to southeast and 12 metres northeast to southwest; the square ones measure around 12 by 10 metres. Notably, neither the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map nor the revised 1913 twenty-five-inch edition shows any trace of the site, which already narrows things considerably. By 1983, investigators described a long, low mound with associated humps and hollows nearby, and put forward two prosaic but plausible explanations: the irregularities could be the result of localised quarrying and earth removal, or they could represent spoil deposited during the construction or drainage of the Royal Canal, which cuts across the landscape just to the northwest. Canal construction in Ireland during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a substantial undertaking that moved enormous quantities of earth, and the dumping of surplus material along the route was commonplace. The honest conclusion reached at the time was that the origin of these features remains uncertain, which is itself a relatively rare admission in the cataloguing of earthworks.