No mound, no stone, no upstanding feature marks them out. They announce themselves only from above, when dry summer conditions cause the crops growing over their filled-in ditches to ripen or stress at a slightly different rate from the surrounding soil, leaving ghostly rings readable in satellite imagery but otherwise undetectable.

A ring-ditch is essentially the buried remnant of a circular fosse, or ditch, which originally enclosed a small area of ground. Such features are often associated with prehistoric funerary or ceremonial activity, though their precise function can vary. The five examples at Kilmagar are modest in scale, each approximately ten metres in diameter. They were identified and reported by Jean-Charles Caillère, who spotted them as cropmarks on satellite imagery. The group is loosely clustered: the two outermost ring-ditches sit roughly 280 metres apart, while the two closest to each other are separated by only about 25 metres, with a fifth positioned roughly in the centre of the arrangement. That spacing suggests something deliberate, perhaps a relationship between the monuments that made sense to the people who placed them, even if that meaning is now beyond recovery.