The feature is a ring-ditch, a type of monument typically associated with prehistoric funerary or ritual activity, in which a circular fosse (a ditch) once defined an enclosed space, sometimes surrounding a burial mound that has long since been ploughed flat. What survives now is essentially a negative impression in the soil, a buried anomaly that only becomes readable from the air, and only under the right conditions.

The site was identified by Jean-Charles Caillère, who noticed it appearing as a cropmark on satellite imagery. Cropmarks form when buried features such as ditches or walls affect the growth of crops above them; a filled-in ditch retains more moisture than the surrounding subsoil, producing a line of lusher, taller, or differently coloured vegetation that shows up clearly when viewed from above, particularly during dry summers when the contrast is at its sharpest. The ring-ditch at Higginstown sits within tillage land, which is precisely the kind of setting where cropmarks tend to be most legible. Notably, it does not sit in isolation. Approximately one hundred metres to the south-east, the cropmarks of three conjoined enclosures are also visible on the same imagery, suggesting a concentration of activity in this part of the landscape that would be entirely invisible to anyone walking the fields today.