Its existence is known only because of what crops do in dry weather above buried features: they stress, they yellow, and in doing so they silently map the archaeology underneath. This particular ring-ditch, roughly ten to fifteen metres in diameter, was identified through exactly that phenomenon, its outline appearing as a cropmark on satellite imagery.

A ring-ditch is, in its simplest form, a circular trench or fosse dug into the ground, often all that survives of a prehistoric funerary or ceremonial monument whose above-ground elements have long since been ploughed flat. The fosse, once dug and later backfilled or silted up, retains slightly different moisture levels from the surrounding soil, and it is this difference that plants register and aerial observation can detect. The Sandfordscourt example was spotted and reported by Jean-Charles Caillère, whose scrutiny of satellite imagery brought a feature invisible at ground level into the archaeological record for the first time.