What the cameras caught, in the summers of 1995 and 1996, were cropmarks, the subtle variations in vegetation colour and growth that occur when buried ditches or earthworks alter moisture levels in the ground above them. One of these marks resolves into a ring-ditch roughly 20 metres in diameter, a circular trench that would once have enclosed or demarcated a burial mound.

This site does not stand alone. It is one of five ring-ditches identified in close proximity to one another, clustered within roughly 50 metres, along with the ploughed-out remnant of a barrow, a low burial mound now so thoroughly flattened by centuries of agriculture that it survives only as a cropmark itself. Taken together, the assemblage points to a prehistoric cemetery, a place where a community returned, generation after generation, to bury its dead and mark those burials in the landscape. Ring-ditches of this kind are typically associated with the Bronze Age, though the term covers a range of monument types spanning several millennia. The fact that multiple examples appear here in such close grouping suggests this corner of Kilkenny held particular significance for the people who used it.