What marks this site is a cropmark, a phenomenon in which buried ditches or pits cause the vegetation above them to grow differently, revealing ancient shapes to anyone looking down from the air at the right moment in the right season. In this case, an aerial photograph taken in July 1989 caught the outline of a ring-ditch: a roughly circular fosse, or ditch, with a diameter of around ten metres. On the ground, there would be nothing obvious to see at all.

A ring-ditch of this size is generally understood to be the surviving trace of a prehistoric burial monument, most likely a small barrow whose central mound has long since been levelled by centuries of ploughing. The fosse is what remains, cut into the subsoil and therefore invisible at the surface but legible from above when dry summer conditions stress the crop unevenly. Even in the 1989 photograph, the record was incomplete: part of the western half of the enclosure was obscured by a macula, a dark irregular soil mark that masked the cropmark beneath it. A separate and larger enclosure sits approximately a hundred metres to the north-north-west, suggesting that this corner of Kilcummer held some significance across a long stretch of prehistory, though the precise relationship between the two features remains unclear.