They look, at first glance, like ring-barrows, the low burial mounds of prehistoric Ireland, typically consisting of a central mound or flat area enclosed by a circular ditch, known as a fosse, and an outer bank. Each of these features measures roughly eight metres in diameter, and two of the three sit almost immediately adjacent to one another, with the third a short distance to the east.

The difficulty is that nobody is entirely certain what they are. The sharpness and regularity of the cropmarks, combined with how close the features sit to Ballinapark House itself, around forty metres to the north, has raised the possibility that they are not ancient at all. Post-1700 designed landscapes around Irish country houses sometimes incorporated earthwork features as decorative or functional elements, and there is a further, more prosaic theory on the table: the circular depressions may have been formed by ring-feeders, the circular metal or timber frames once used to hold fodder for livestock in fields. That explanation remains unconfirmed. The antiquity of these earthworks is, in the careful language of archaeology, uncertain.