The problem is that nobody is entirely certain it is one. Five similar earthworks are clustered together in a surprisingly small field, measuring roughly 59 metres by 110 metres, immediately north of the now-abandoned ruins of Knockloe House, and that concentration alone gives archaeologists pause.

The doubts are reasonable and instructive. The landowner recalled that the field was used for ringing horses in the nineteenth century, a practice of exercising animals on a lead in tight circles, which can leave circular impressions in the ground. One of the other earthworks in the same group appears, on a 2005 aerial photograph, to be nothing more than a circular feeding trough rather than anything of prehistoric origin. The proximity of all five features to Knockloe House and their neat preservation within a single narrow field raises the possibility that some or all of them are simply the residue of post-medieval estate and farming activity rather than ancient funerary monuments. Aerial photography has been useful here, with a Digital Globe image from November 2011 making the clustering of the earthworks clearly visible, and cropmarks on the earlier OSI photograph helping to distinguish features at ground level that are otherwise easy to miss.