No earthwork, no upstanding stone, no depression in the ground gives any hint that something ancient lies beneath the surface. The monument exists entirely below the topsoil, invisible to anyone walking overhead, and it came to light only when a high-resolution magnetic gradiometer survey picked up a strong, well-defined response in the earth beneath the field.

What the survey revealed, and subsequent test trenching confirmed, is a penannular ring-ditch, a roughly circular enclosure interrupted by a gap, a form commonly associated with prehistoric funerary or ceremonial use. This one measures 6.4 metres across on a north-south axis, with a ditch averaging around 1.4 metres wide. When archaeologists opened a trench and investigated the ditch by hand, they found it to be 1.8 metres wide at the point of excavation, only 0.31 metres deep, and shaped in a flattened U-profile. Inside it were two distinct layers of fill: a lower stoney greyish yellow silty clay, and above it a reddish brown silty clay. From that upper fill came a single sherd of prehistoric pottery, a fragment small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, but carrying considerable information. Specialists Eoin Grogan and Helen Roche assessed its decoration and fabric as cord-impressed, a technique in which twisted cord was pressed into wet clay before firing. They suggest it may be a rimsherd of a broad-rimmed bowl dating to roughly 3700 to 3500 BC, or possibly part of a globular bowl from around 3300 to 3100 BC. Either way, the vessel was made during the Neolithic period, when farming communities were establishing themselves across Ireland and constructing monuments to their dead.

A single pottery sherd from a ditch less than a third of a metre deep is a slender thread connecting the present to a moment somewhere between five and five and a half thousand years ago. The field above it gives nothing away.