The monument in question is the largest of a cluster of eight ring-ditches sitting roughly 400 metres from the coast, visible not as earthworks you might stumble across in a field, but as cropmarks, those ghostly outlines that appear in aerial photographs when buried features affect how crops grow above them.

Ring-ditches are circular trenches, often all that survives when a burial mound, or barrow, has been levelled by centuries of ploughing. The largest example at Kilpoole is bivallate, meaning it has two concentric ditches rather than one, with an inner diameter of around 15 metres and an outer diameter of roughly 30 metres. It is this double-ditched monument that a road has sliced through, erasing part of the circuit entirely. The remaining seven ring-ditches, ranging from about 5 to 15 metres in diameter, cluster to its south-west and north-west, three of them actually adjoining the outer ditch of the larger site and the rest lying within 30 metres of it. Together they form part of a much broader complex of ring-ditches that continues eastward toward the Wicklow coast, suggesting that this low-lying coastal strip was once a significant, if now almost invisible, burial landscape.