On 13 July 1989, an aerial photograph captured a cropmark, the faint but telling difference in colour and growth that ripening grain shows above buried ditches and foundations, outlining a ring-ditch roughly 20 metres in diameter. The feature is invisible at ground level; it exists, for practical purposes, only as a shadow read from altitude.

Ring-ditches are the buried remains of circular ditches, often interpreted as the outer boundaries of Bronze Age burial mounds whose earthen centres have long since been ploughed flat. This particular example is the larger of two that sit close together near Oldtown, a pairing that would not be unusual in a funerary landscape where successive or related burials might cluster within sight of one another. What adds further interest is their immediate setting: both ring-ditches lie near a curved fosse, a term for a substantial ditch used as a boundary feature, that appears to mark the corner of a large rectilinear enclosure or field boundary. Whether that enclosure is contemporary with the ring-ditches or belongs to a later period of land organisation is not something the cropmark evidence alone can resolve, but the proximity suggests this corner of Kilkenny accumulated significance across more than one era of use.