On the 1839 edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map, it appears as nothing more than a small tree-ring, the kind of symbol a cartographer might use for an ornamental planting or a lone specimen in a field. That quiet misidentification kept it out of the archaeological record for over a century and a half.

The feature came to light through a magnetic gradiometer survey, a non-invasive technique that detects variations in the soil's magnetic properties and can reveal buried or earthen features invisible to the eye. That survey, carried out over a wide area of what was once the demesne of Coolcliffe House, identified not one but four ring-ditches in the vicinity. A ring-ditch is typically the surviving trace of a prehistoric funerary or ceremonial monument, most often the encircling fosse, or ditch, that once surrounded a burial mound since ploughed or eroded away. This particular example measures roughly twelve metres in diameter and is defined by a single fosse with two small breaks, one on the west side approximately two metres wide and one on the east side approximately one metre wide. These gaps may represent original entrance points. The earthwork sits on a north-west-facing slope above the point where a smaller stream meets the Corock River, the river itself changing course at that same confluence from a broadly east-west alignment to a north-south one. Whether that topographical position was deliberate on the part of whoever constructed the monument is a question the survey alone cannot answer, though prominent waterway junctions held clear significance in prehistoric landscape thinking.