No earthwork survives above ground, no stone marks the spot, yet from the air a near-perfect circle emerges, roughly ten to eleven metres across, etched into the earth in the form of a cropmark. The circle is defined by a continuous fosse, the term for a ditch cut into the ground, and it is this buried ditch that betrays the site to aerial observation. Where soil has been disturbed and then filled in over centuries, crops above tend to grow differently from their neighbours, taller or shorter, greener or more parched depending on the season, and in doing so they quietly trace the outlines of what lies beneath.

This particular feature is classified as a ring-ditch, a broad category that typically encompasses the remains of prehistoric funerary or ritual monuments. Many ring-ditches in Ireland are understood to be the eroded remnants of Bronze Age barrows, low burial mounds whose earthen bulk has long since been ploughed or weathered away, leaving only the encircling ditch as evidence. The site at Upton sits at the crest of its slope, a position that would have been deliberate in antiquity, placing the monument on the skyline as seen from the east. It was first reported by Jean Charles Caillére, and is visible on aerial imagery captured as early as 2004 to 2006, with a further sighting confirmed on Google Earth imagery from July 2018.