Ring-ditches of this kind are the ghostly traces of prehistoric funerary or ritual enclosures, circular ditches dug around a central area, sometimes accompanying a burial mound that has long since been ploughed flat. What remains is essentially a memory held in the earth, where the disturbed subsoil affects how deeply roots can reach and how readily crops ripen, producing a pattern that only becomes legible under the right light and at the right season.

The site came to attention on the 10th of July 1973, when an aerial photograph taken as part of the Cambridge University Committee for Aerial Photography programme captured the cropmark clearly enough to identify it. The same photograph revealed a second, slightly larger circular cropmark sitting about twenty metres to the north-west, suggesting the two features may be related, a pairing that sometimes occurs with ring-ditches in Irish and British prehistory. Despite this, the site was subsequently entered into the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996 under the misleading classification of an archaeological complex, a broader and somewhat grander designation that the evidence did not support. The record was later corrected to reflect what the aerial evidence actually shows: a single ring-ditch, with its neighbour catalogued separately.