It exists, at least to modern eyes, only as a cropmark, a faint circular discolouration in growing crops that betrays a buried ditch beneath the soil. The mark was captured in an aerial photograph taken on 13 July 1989, one of countless such images taken during systematic surveys of the Irish landscape that revealed, from altitude, what centuries of ploughing had long since erased at surface level.

A ring-ditch is typically the surviving trace of a prehistoric burial mound, most often a Bronze Age barrow, where the outer encircling ditch remains detectable in the soil long after the central mound itself has been levelled. Crops growing above the filled ditch draw on subtly different soil conditions and grow at a slightly different rate, producing the circular pattern visible from the air. What makes Parksgrove quietly remarkable is not one such feature but a cluster of them. Three further ring-ditches lie within roughly 160 metres to the south-southeast, suggesting this was once a purposeful funerary landscape, a grouping of monuments that implies repeated, deliberate use of the same stretch of ground over a long period. Such clusters are known elsewhere in Ireland and often indicate that the area held particular significance to the communities who created them, though the specifics of what took place here remain unknown.