What they found was a small but coherent prehistoric landscape: a ring-ditch, a cremation pit, and two circular structures arranged within a few metres of one another.

A ring-ditch is the buried remnant of a circular earthwork, typically the eroded base of a bank or the filled-in trench that once surrounded a mound or monument. The one at Charlesland was modest in scale, enclosing a near-circular area roughly 5.6 metres across, with a ditch about 1.4 metres wide and averaging 0.6 metres in depth. Nine flint fragments were recovered from within it. Just over three metres to the north-east lay the cremation pit, containing deposits of cremated bone, charcoal, and large stones, suggesting a deliberate burial rite rather than incidental burning. Ten metres to the west, a small circular structure roughly three metres in diameter had been defined by a narrow slot-trench, the kind of shallow channel cut to hold the base of a continuous wall or screen of timber, with post-holes marking an entrance and a single post at the centre. An outer ring of post-holes surrounded it, and several fragments of prehistoric pottery were found among them. An eleventh metres to the north of that, a second, slightly smaller structure had been traced through a scatter of post-holes and stake-holes describing a shallow circular depression less than three metres wide and only fourteen centimetres deep. Taken together, the features point to a site of some ritual or domestic significance in prehistory, its precise date uncertain but its presence confirmed by the chance of a road scheme passing directly through it.