It only reveals itself from the air, where the soil's differential response to crop growth traces the outline of an ancient fosse, the encircling ditch that once defined whatever stood or was interred at the centre. That kind of feature, visible as a cropmark on aerial photography but leaving no surface trace, belongs to a category archaeologists call a ring-ditch, and this one near Kilpoole is not alone.

The site forms part of a substantial cluster of at least eight related ring-ditches spread across the same area of low, level ground, sitting just three hundred metres or so from the shoreline. The most likely interpretation of features like this is that they are the ghostly remnants of ring-barrows, prehistoric burial mounds whose earthen mounds have been gradually levelled by centuries of ploughing until nothing survives above the plough-soil except the ditch that once surrounded the mound. Ring-barrows are generally associated with the Bronze Age, though the date of any individual example can rarely be confirmed without excavation. Two further ring-ditches in the same complex lie seventy to eighty metres to the south-east, suggesting that this stretch of coastal Wicklow once held a burial landscape of some extent, its monuments now erased to the point where only the cropmark record preserves any memory of them.