What nobody could have anticipated, at least not so concretely, was that the reservoir would eventually begin to give things back. As water levels drop and wave action gradually strips away topsoil and subsoil from the exposed plateau at the south-eastern edge of Burgage More townland, prehistoric features are emerging from the ground, some of them invisible to the eye until a trowel scrapes the surface and the texture of the soil changes under the hand.

One such feature is a ring-ditch, a type of circular earthwork most commonly associated with Bronze Age funerary practice, typically the remains of a ditch that once surrounded a burial mound or barrow. This particular example is nearly perfectly circular, with an internal diameter of just over four metres and a ditch width ranging between sixteen and twenty-six centimetres. The fill inside the ditch is a softer grey-brown clay flecked with charcoal, distinguishable from the hard yellow subsoil around it as much by feel as by colour. A gap of nearly two metres in the south-eastern arc of the ditch, combined with the absence of post-holes, suggests this is not the remnant of a domestic structure but rather a funerary monument. The interior contained only one anomaly: a rounded patch of clay about thirty-five centimetres across with a reddish-brown hardened surface, identified as a natural iron-pan deposit. A second ring-ditch lies just twenty-five metres to the south, and to the east, visible on the crest of a nearby hill, is a cursus, a type of elongated Neolithic ceremonial enclosure. The landscape around Burgage More, it turns out, was once densely marked with monuments. Also visible across the exposed ground are faint furrows spaced roughly two and a half metres apart, likely the traces of lazy bed cultivation, the ridge-and-furrow system historically used to grow potatoes on marginal land. The site was first recorded and examined approximately two weeks after its initial discovery in 2018, by which point the exposed features had already dried out considerably, making identification significantly harder.