Around twelve metres across, it survives not as a mound or a ditch you could step into, but as a faint circular shadow in the soil, visible only from the air when dry summer weather causes the crop above it to grow differently from the surrounding field. That kind of mark, known as a cropmark, is among the few ways archaeology reveals itself without excavation, and at Kilpoole it outlines what was probably once a ring-barrow, a low funerary mound encircled by a ditch, long since ploughed flat.

The site sits on level ground with views towards the sea, and it is far from alone. It forms part of a cluster of at least seven related ring-ditches recorded in the immediate area, the nearest of which lies roughly sixty metres to the north-west. Concentrations like this are not unusual in Irish prehistory; ring-barrows were often grouped together, suggesting that particular stretches of landscape held repeated or sustained significance for the communities who buried their dead there. A fosse, that is a ditch cut into the earth, typically defined the boundary of such a monument, and where centuries of tillage have removed the upstanding elements, the fosse alone survives as a soil trace, preserved just below plough depth.