No earthwork breaks the grass, no mound draws the eye, and a person walking the field would have no idea they were crossing what is, in all likelihood, an ancient burial landscape. The existence of this cluster of ring-ditches was only confirmed on the 16th of July 1971, when an aerial photograph, catalogued as CUCAP BGG067, caught the faint cropmark traces that ground-level inspection would never reveal. Ring-ditches are the plough-levelled or naturally eroded remains of circular enclosures, most commonly associated with Bronze Age burial mounds; what survives is the ghost of the original surrounding ditch, preserved as a difference in soil moisture that shows up in crops or grass when viewed from above.

The field at Jenkinstown holds not one but seven of these features, numbered in close sequence and spaced between roughly 20 and 120 metres apart, suggesting this terrace was used repeatedly, perhaps over generations, as a place set apart for the dead. The setting has a logic to it. The land sits on a gentle slope between two river systems, the Nore running northwest to southeast about two kilometres to the east, and the Dinin River running northeast to southwest a similar distance to the west, the two converging roughly two kilometres to the south. This kind of elevated ground above a river confluence, with open views in all directions, recurs across Irish prehistoric landscapes as a favoured location for monuments of significance. The people who dug these ditches chose their ground deliberately.