From a distance, the formation reads convincingly as something ancient and deliberate, an old embanked road perhaps, or the earthwork remains of some forgotten enclosure. It is neither. What looks like a monument is in fact the byproduct of industry, the spoil heaps thrown up on either side of a quarry trench cut through the hilltop.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp noticed the site in 1913, describing it as a conspicuous object visible from both the north and south, the two great parallel mounds straddling the saddle of the hill with slightly lower ground running between them. He captured, perhaps unintentionally, how persuasively a purely functional landscape feature can mimic something of greater antiquity. The hill itself is named Knockardnagowel, and the quarry strip running across its summit measures approximately sixteen metres in width. The mounds flanking it to the east and west are simply the material extracted and piled clear of the working area. The quarry is now disused, and the vegetation has long since softened whatever raw edges the extraction once left.