From the air or on a map, it reads as a circular or near-circular shallow trench, often the last surviving trace of a prehistoric burial monument. Ring-ditches of this type are generally understood to be the eroded remnants of round barrows, where the outer ditch that once surrounded a central burial mound has outlasted everything else, leaving only its own faint impression in the soil.

Garranes itself is a townland with some archaeological weight to it. The area is perhaps best known for the early medieval ringfort of Garranes, which was excavated in the late 1930s and found to contain evidence of high-status metalworking, including enamelling and the production of fine metalwork associated with the La Tène tradition. That ringfort, a roughly circular enclosure defined by banks and ditches and used as a defended farmstead or settlement in early medieval Ireland, suggested a place of some local importance across several periods. A ring-ditch in the same townland fits into a broader pattern of activity stretching back well into prehistory, though without excavation it is difficult to say much about the specific date or function of this particular feature.