On its own, that description sounds unremarkable. What makes it quietly arresting is that this feature spent the better part of two centuries hiding in plain sight, mapped on the 1839 Ordnance Survey six-inch sheet not as an archaeological monument but apparently as a small tree-ring, the kind of notation a surveyor might use to mark an ornamental clump of planting within a country estate.

The site lies on land that once formed part of the demesne of Coolcliffe House, and it was only a magnetic gradiometer survey, a technique that detects subsurface features by measuring subtle variations in the earth's magnetic field, that brought its true character into focus. That survey identified not one but four ring-ditches across the area. A ring-ditch is typically the surviving trace of a prehistoric burial monument, the encircling fosse, or ditch, that once defined a mound or cairn now long since ploughed or eroded away. This particular example is defined by a single fosse with openings, or breaks, on the south-west and north-east sides, each around four metres wide. Such opposed entrances are a recognised feature of certain prehistoric enclosures, and their presence here adds a degree of architectural intention to what the landscape now shows as nothing more than a gentle undulation in a field slope above a river bend.