Somewhere beneath a ploughed and reclaimed grassland floor in the Ballyconra valley lies a ring-ditch, a circular earthwork whose original form has been worn away by centuries of agriculture until it registers no trace above ground whatsoever. Its existence is known only because aerial photography caught it at the right moment, when differential crop growth above the buried soil revealed its outline as a cropmark, a faint discolouration visible from the air but invisible to anyone walking the field.

The site is one of three ring-ditches in close proximity on the same valley floor, the others lying roughly 30 metres to the south-south-east and 90 metres to the south-west. A further circular enclosure sits around 330 metres to the south-west. The clustering is not thought to be coincidental. The ring-ditches may be associated with a co-axial field system, an organised arrangement of fields laid out along broadly parallel boundaries, suggesting this flat ground was once part of a planned agricultural or ceremonial landscape. Ring-ditches themselves are generally understood to be the eroded remains of round barrows or other circular monuments, though without excavation the precise function of any individual example is difficult to confirm. What can be said is that this particular valley held enough human activity, at some point in the prehistoric or early historic past, to leave behind at least four such features within a few hundred metres of one another.