In the dry summers of 1995 and 1996, aerial photography revealed a cropmark: a near-perfect circular stain in the vegetation, roughly ten metres across, tracing the outline of a ring-ditch beneath the ploughed soil. A ring-ditch is the circular trench that once surrounded a burial mound, all that remains when the mound itself has been levelled by centuries of agriculture. On its own, a single ring-ditch might be unremarkable. What makes Garryduff stranger is the company it keeps.

This particular feature is one of five ring-ditches clustered together in the same field, and all five sit close to what appears to have been a barrow, a low earthen burial mound, now entirely plough-levelled and visible only as another ghost in the cropmarks. Taken together, the whole grouping points toward a prehistoric cemetery, a place where a community returned, over perhaps many generations, to bury its dead in a defined and deliberate landscape. The individual ring-ditches at Garryduff span a small area, suggesting this was not a scattered or accidental accumulation but something organised, a mortuary zone whose surface expression has been almost entirely erased by tillage over the millennia.

There is nothing to see at ground level today. The site sits in working agricultural land, and the features exist only as soil and crop anomalies that reward the overhead view. The aerial photographs taken in August 1995 and again in August 1996 captured the cropmarks at their most legible, the kind of dry-summer conditions that cause vegetation above buried ditches to grow differently from the surrounding crop, briefly making the invisible visible.