No earthwork rises above the grass, no depression marks the ground, no stones hint at what lies beneath. The only way this structure has ever been seen is from the air, where it emerges as a cropmark, the faint but legible signature that buried archaeology leaves on growing crops during dry conditions, as differential moisture in the soil causes vegetation above a buried ditch or bank to ripen at a slightly different rate than the surrounding land.

Aerial photographs taken in July 1973 and again in July 2000 revealed this ring-ditch, a type of circular earthwork most commonly associated with prehistoric funerary or ritual enclosures, though the term is applied broadly and individual examples can be difficult to date without excavation. What makes the Clintstown site particularly interesting is that it does not sit in isolation. A second ring-ditch lies approximately 110 metres to the north, and a third approximately 180 metres to the north-east, suggesting that this corner of Kilkenny once held a cluster of related monuments. All three are associated with a co-axial field system in the same area, a landscape feature characterised by a series of roughly parallel boundaries that organised land into long strips, a pattern sometimes prehistoric in origin but also known from later periods. Whether the ring-ditches and the field system belong to the same moment in time, or represent successive generations of people using and reusing the same ground, remains an open question.